OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 4.3, Eighth Edition

Compressed Textures

Compression is a mechanism by which the amount of data required to store or transmit information is reduced. Because texture data can consume a very large amount of memory (and consequently, memory bandwidth), OpenGL supports storing textures in compressed forms in order to reduce their size. Compression algorithms fall into two general categories—lossless and lossy. Lossless compression algorithms will not discard any information and an exact copy of the original is retrievable after decompression. However, lossy compression sacrifices some of the original information during the process in order to make the remaining information more suited to the compression algorithm and reduce its size. This will reduce quality some but ...