Of the many things Mark Cerny explained in detail during Sony’s recent deep dive into the PS5’s tech, one thing he mentioned was the console’s new texture decompression tech, called Kraken. Though it’s too specific to be anything but technical jargon to the layman, it should prove to be quite useful to developers, owing to how much more efficiently it operates than the current gen consoles.
Texture decompression isn’t something that Microsoft have talked about for the Xbox Series X too much yet, but according to industry professionals, their solution might be better even than Sony’s Kraken. Richard Geldreich, who formerly worked at Valve and Ensemble Studios, took to Twitter to say that Microoft’s texture decompression, BCPack, is their “dark horse” and might be a stronger option than Kraken.
He posed that question to James Stanard, who works on graphics optimization R&D and engine architecture on Microsoft. Though Stanard was reluctant to divulge many details about it, he went on to explain it briefly, it is specifically designed for texture decompression, before Geldreich added that being dedicated tech for this purpose will allow it to function more efficiently than Kraken, which is more of a general purpose system.
One thing that’s becoming clearer in recent days is that the PS5 and the Xbox Series both have significant advantages over the other in different areas– but both of them are incredible pieces of hardware that developers are quite excited to work on. Here’s hoping both of them reveal more details about their next-gen consoles in the near future.
Gamers comparing Xbox Series X vs. PS5 aren't factoring in Microsoft's dark horse: BCPack. We don't have any real details yet, but it's possible that BCPack will be stronger than RDO BCx encoding+Kraken compression.
— Richard Geldreich (@richgel999) March 20, 2020
Microsoft engineers deeply understand the importance of texture compression. I think they spent several years working on it. I look forward to them revealing more details!
— Richard Geldreich (@richgel999) March 22, 2020
@JamesStanard Can you talk about BCPack more in public yet? Sony is getting a ton of good response from the gaming public about putting Kraken in hardware. You guys need to talk more about BCPack!https://t.co/o2BhtKZ81C
— Richard Geldreich (@richgel999) March 20, 2020
Sorry. We're not ready to share more publicly, but we have revealed more to Xbox licensees. I am actively improving the Xbox Texture Compressor (XBTC) and will be sharing frequent updates with the Xbox community as they come.
— James Stanard (@JamesStanard) March 20, 2020
https://twitter.com/JamesStanard/status/1241076025477357568
The bulk of the data games have to deal with is GPU texture data. Kraken (in PS5) is a general purpose system, not explicitly designed with texture data in mind. What Microsoft has is specially designed to kick ass on texture data. That's what counts!
— Richard Geldreich (@richgel999) March 20, 2020
Some back of the envelope figures:
– Kraken: Reduces the size of a complex non-RDO encoded BC7 format texture (say a normal map) by approx. 20-30%.
– BCPack: Approx. 50+% size reduction. Depends on how far MS pushed the tech. Definitely more effective than just Kraken alone.— Richard Geldreich (@richgel999) March 22, 2020
What we don't know is how optimized BCPack is. Does it support all BC7 modes, or just a few? How effective is it vs. the crunch library for BC1-5? Does it support a wide range of quality levels? Can it work in parallel with HW decompression?
— Richard Geldreich (@richgel999) March 22, 2020
MS is keeping all this info under NDA for now, for good reason because it's a big advantage over what Sony has revealed so far. Kraken is awesome tech, but it's just better lossless compression. That's not enough for texture data. Generic LZ is just that – generic.
— Richard Geldreich (@richgel999) March 22, 2020
I'm interested in the details because I want to know what tech console game developers have access to in hardware. I've been writing lossless/texture codecs for around 15 years, so it's key info.
— Richard Geldreich (@richgel999) March 22, 2020
Yes, dramatically less demanding. However, PS5 devs can encode their textures in a special way (with rate distortion optimization or "RDO"), and this combined with Kraken should make up for the lack of a BCPack equivalent in hardware.
— Richard Geldreich (@richgel999) March 22, 2020
I would be surprised if Sony didn't have good RDO texture encoders for the GPU formats supported by their console in their SDK. It's a no brainier. If they don't have them now, they'll have them soon or they cannot compete.
— Richard Geldreich (@richgel999) March 22, 2020
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