Its interesting that Thandra just did  a post about this, saying SASL isnt the biggest FPS hit, but textures, They have had discussions with Laminar as Laminar love DDS not PNG. Thandra complained they could not fiind a decent DDS converter, seems they found one, so a lot of there planes will be converted to DDS soon enough except for some of the  stuff you can change in cockpit, that may remain DDS. It also seems that Laminar have being convinced to try make PNG texture usage a little more efficient.

Oh that life was so simple.

I don't get it. X-Plane does not care about DDS or png format, but if a developer can not find a texture converter that can handle 8K textures, it's suddenly Laminar's problem...?

1 hour ago, Bjoern said:

I don't get it. X-Plane does not care about DDS or png format, but if a developer can not find a texture converter that can handle 8K textures, it's suddenly Laminar's problem...?

Maybe you dont, but I think Thandra with the quality of the work they do, do understand and Id assume Laminar do too, considering. Dont recall them saying it was Laminars problem. There concern is PNG textures.

Not sure why they would want DDS. PNG textures require far less data size compared to a 4K or an 8K (Virtavia killed there L1049G in P3D with 12-16 mb DDS textures, I have had no trouble converting DDS back to PNG and they look and work fine in XP12. Maybe PNG is less capable than DDS for colour, shaping and perception but not sure given the overall sim environment I need it after all most of the action is inside with a flat screen with representations of aircraft instrumentation. I have done dozens of repaints all to the PNG format. Thranda's problem is their texture architecture - they load the model up with a lot draw calls! Thrandas internal logic (ala their dynamic livery system) is clunky and will hang my entire system for up to 3-4 minutes while it works on the colour call.

Laminar could fix up the textures of LC by simply getting ORBX to port over all their excellent LC for basically the world (their were numerous FSX/P3D packages for everywhere like Australia)  and replacing their default LC textures. ORBX could get a cut or fee for each copy of XP sold - simple. Why reinvent the wheel when the LC textures are already done. 

6 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

Not sure why they would want DDS.

Something to do with DDS can contain all the sizes in one file so it doesnt need swapping. You should go read the thandra details, I suggest thatLaminar also would like to control everything to get away from all those dogy texture days that where killing everything.

Interesting discussion.
I'm not a "deep" expert on graphics formats, and after doing a little research I think I've understood that the DDS format would be highly preferable in complex situations with a high number of objects and textures to render without losing too much framerate.
In short, for the same number of textured objects, DDS is faster than PNG, which would become an advantage to limit the excessive waste of VRAM that could occur to those who cannot afford to buy very expensive video cards.
In this regard I found this topic ( https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/207475-dds-vs-png-format/ )and I'm tempted to carry out the experiment of converting some XP12 PNGs to DDS to see how much I can actually gain in performance.

Preference for DDS is mostly about better load times, not runtime performance.

From the information I was able to find on the net it seems that the DDS format behaves as if it were "tricking the video card" making it believe that the file to be processed/rendered is much smaller and leaner.
So with DDS the card loads and processes the graphic information more quickly than with PNG, and this translates into greater overall performance with less waste of VRAM (and therefore less possibility of having artifacts on the screen such as the infamous blurry panels)

https://developer.x-plane.com/2007/08/the-case-for-dds/#:~:text=Image load time is a,and process means faster performance.

8k ??? Wow... I'm so so so fine with 2k ....

Can the aircraft textures get converted to 2k?

From what I could gather, PNG is more storage space friendly (smaller file size due to no mip maps), while DDS is more GPU friendly (no need to downsample by the GPU as mip maps are already available). Mip maps are smaller copies of the original image, each step at quarter the resolution, down to 1 x 1 px.

Example: 8K texture. PNG, 30% compression: 31.6 MB.  DDS, DXT5 compressed, 13 mip map levels: 85.3 MB.

Since the GPU neeeds lower res copies of the original texture, the answer to the question of DDS vs png is if this is to be done before or after loading the texture into the video RAM.

 

 

4 hours ago, jcomm said:

Can the aircraft textures get converted to 2k?

Of course. Any image editor with DDS import/export (e.g. GIMP) will do.

Edited November 5, 20241 yr by Bjoern