Speaker: Elias Kristmann
Abstract
Although variable-rate compressed image formats such as JPEG are widely used to efficiently encode images, they have not
found their way into real-time rendering due to special requirements such as random access to individual texels. In this paper,
we investigate the feasibility of variable-rate texture compression on modern GPUs using the JPEG format, and how it compares
to the GPU-friendly fixed-rate compression approaches BC1 and ASTC. Using a deferred rendering pipeline, we are able to
identify the subset of blocks that are needed for a given frame, decode these, and colorize the framebuffer’s pixels. Despite the
additional ∼0.17 bit per pixel that we require for our approach, JPEG maintains significantly better quality and compression
rates compared to BC1, and depending on the type of image, outperforms or competes with ASTC. The JPEG rendering pipeline
increases rendering duration by less than 0.3 ms on an NVIDIA RTX 4090, demonstrating that sophisticated variable-rate
compression schemes are feasible on modern GPUs, even in VR.
Source code and data sets are available at: https://github.com/elias1518693/jpeg_textures