Some reading for the weekend:
Implementation details of Apple's lossy texture compression format.
https://www.ludicon.com/castano/blog/2026/04/metal-lossy-compression-format/
Enjoy!
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Ignacio Castaño🍉
@castano@mastodon.gamedev.place
mastodon 4.7.3Master swimmer, mountain climber, and stand up coder.
I work on texture processing tools at Ludicon.
Formerly at Roblox, Thekla (The Witness), NVIDIA, OddWorld, Relic, Crytek.
1374 Followers
395 Following
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Joined November 13, 2017
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I thought aliasing buffers and compressed textures in order to write to them was a very bad idea, but after playing with it, it actually seems fine?
https://www.ludicon.com/castano/blog/2026/04/writing-to-compressed-textures-in-metal/
I'm going camping this Thursday, so this week's blog post is out a little early.
Larger ASTC block sizes save bandwidth, but may not save memory at all. I tested many iOS and Android devices to find the actual cost of memory alignment:
https://www.ludicon.com/castano/blog/2026/04/the-true-size-of-astc-textures/
Replying to
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place I’ve had many torn pulleys, but not a single wrist problem since I started climbing. I used to have carpal tunnel syndrome back in the day.
Replying to
@nickappleton@mastodon.gamedev.place @rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place I distribute shader source code, because there’s no other viable way to redistribute shader libraries (outside of metal). I heavily process that code, amalgamate all the sources, strip comments, and run a custom preprocessor that preserves some preprocessor directives, and eliminates others. I use it to eliminate shader variants that are experimental or for development only. The whole system is bit janky, but I’m not sure how to improve it given my limited resources.
Replying to
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place right? Wish I could talk to some of those hw engineers.
Replying to
@keiwando@mastodon.gamedev.place @StompyRobot@mastodon.gamedev.place Thanks! Someone at Apple reached out to bump the priority. I'll try calling next if I don't see any progress in spite of that.
Replying to
@thesolidpixel@mastodon.gamedev.place @rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place @breakin@mastodon.gamedev.place Yeah, my main concern is the driver making different tiling decisions at runtime or after os/driver updates. I'll have to play with it some more, but I think it's worth offering it as an option if I don't run into problems.
In Vulkan resource casting already provides most of the benefit, and aliasing is more complex due to device fragmentation, but I think that's the kind of complexity I can absorb if it makes a difference.
Replying to
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place My inclination would be to only enable this on known existing devices. Future devices will certainly change, but it’d be good to get some guarantees about devices that are already out.
Replying to
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place yeah, would love IHVs to chime in and comment whether there any pitfalls like that in their hardware, otherwise I guess I’ll find out the hard way.
Looks like I'm locked out of both Apple and Google's developer programs.
I let my memberships lapse while dealing with more pressing things, and now I'm trying to restore them, but my Apple account is locked and Google is rejecting my re-enrollment with no explanation.
I opened a support request with Apple two weeks ago and haven't heard nothing. I can't even figure out how to open one with Google.
Does anybody know what avenues I have to resolve this?
Replying to
@NohatCoder@mastodon.gamedev.place Sigh, counting is hard.