GPU Pro 7

2

V

Real-Time BC6H Compression

on GPU

Krzysztof Narkowicz

2.1 Introduction

BC6H texture compression is a lossy block compression designed for compressing

high-dynamic range (HDR) images; it is also widely supported by modern GPUs.

It drastically decreases memory usage and improves runtime performance, as it

also decreases required GPU bandwidth.

Real-time HDR compression is needed in certain applications—e.g., when

HDR data is generated at runtime or when offline compression is too slow. It

is usually desirable for real-time compression to entirely bypass the CPU and

run the compression algorithm on the GPU. This way, resource expensive CPU-

GPU synchronization ...