"ProFX" to Reduce Size of Texture Files by 70%

[Graham Templeton]

"ProFX" to Reduce Size of Texture Files by 70%

At the recent GDC in London, Allegorithmic showcased their new technology, which they claim will reduce texture file sizes in games by up to 70%.

Allegorithmic [http://www.allegorithmic.com/v2/techno.htm], a company focused on developing technology for graphic artists, is confident that its new ProFX tech will be adopted by the entire gaming industry. And it's easy to see why they might think that.

Textures have, historically, been the most space-consuming part of games, and with digital distribution making file size an issue once again, many companies are looking for any way to make their game smaller. File size is even becoming an issue for console manufacturers, with Sony claiming that the higher storage capacity of their BluRay discs gives developers more freedom. Allegorithmic might argue that developers don't necessarily need all that new room.

As can be seen here [http://www.allegorithmic.com/v2/ProFX_pipeline.htm], ProFX essentially works by making a procedural "description" of an artist-created bitmap image. This description can be as small as a "few kilobytes," yet describe an immensely detailed texture. ProFX then allows the game engine to decode this description, making the small file back into the high-resolution texture file. When combined with the game engine's shader system, these compressed textures appear as detailed as full-sized texture files.

An example of ProFX in action can be seen in the upcoming XBox Live Arcade game RoboBlitz [http://www.roboblitz.com/site.html]. RoboBlitz uses the Unreal 3 engine, yet still manages to clock in below the XBLA maximum total size of fifty megabytes. In fact, through the use of the ProFX technology, the entire texture library for the game is smaller than 300 kilobytes.

Source [http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/10/04/Game_file_sizes_could_soon_be_70_smaller/].

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[Goofonian]

22GB for resistance ey?

 

[Ajar]

Wow, that's pretty cool. Of course, the artist still has to create the original texture, so it won't help game budgets.

I'll definitely check out RoboBlitz when it appears on the Live Arcade.

 

[heavyfeul]

I wonder how this will affect resource utilization on PC/Console. Will the decompression plus the burden of rendering place more stress on system resources? I would hate to lose some playablity in favor of storage capacity. Anyone out there know how this might affect gameplay?

 

[UCRC]

I wonder how this will affect resource utilization on PC/Console. Will the decompression plus the burden of rendering place more stress on system resources? I would hate to lose some playablity in favor of storage capacity. Anyone out there know how this might affect gameplay?

Probably it involves compression so it would affect performance in *some* way. The point is, that textures in games has to be compressed (and recompressed, causing the performance drop) anyway - only difference is, that most of game artist use not efficient compressing tools ("who cares?").
Would that affect box games market? Probably not, they could always make five dvd game (and be like "whoa, we're kewl! our game is HUGE GUYZ!") and other Resistance stuff. But that ProFX could improve views on downloadable content and online distribution.

 

[TomBeraha]

I'm surprised you'd suggest that it won't be of use to the box games market UCRC. Consider that those discs are ALWAYS a finite maximum of space available. Shrinking the textures allows them to include more video / audio / concept art / others into the final package making for a more alluring game overall. Spanning multiple discs might give you a feeling of "whoa we're kewl" but if it can save the producer the cost of pressing 5 additional discs each game, trust me they're gonna do it. The performance cut should be negligible. And with console's habit of preloading textures / levels (which is uncompressing so we're all clear) this wont affect gameplay in the slightest is my guess.


As to PCs, the ability to include more data on the same space is always always valuable. No matter how much space modern PC's have, they'll always need more. Processing power is not as hard to come by as it once was, decompression of textures happens easily on all modern vid cards. I imagine if the industry adopts it, that both Nvidia / ATI will offer hardware support to speed things along with the next generation of it, It would only make sense.

Very obviously it improves things for downloadable content in the form of patches and online distributing of games (like Steam). But I'm curious also if the tools can be made available to the editing kits of the games, one example I'll give is Oblivion. Very few of the original textures are left in the copy of that game that I'm playing. Would the high res new textures that I've grabbed all over the place, the book jackets so on, can they all benefit from this tech too? That's something that will probably have to be looked at by the company that makes the tech and the game company trying to buy that feature for it's userbase.

- Tom

 

[UCRC]

I'm surprised you'd suggest that it won't be of use to the box games market UCRC. Consider that those discs are ALWAYS a finite maximum of space available. Shrinking the textures allows them to include more video / audio / concept art / others into the final package making for a more alluring game overall.

Yep, of course you're right. But Resistance example is proving something different: there is always aspect of devs being lazy - if they don't have to compress even... cinematics (and probably that will be case), they WON'T DO IT. Saying it with different words - I don't believe that space is barrier for any main game developer (and I don't believe that they have to cut content just because there isn't enough space on DVD) - so my point was, that ProFX probably won't cause a revolution with bunch of games coming out with more content included. It will just help to liquidate additional DVD's ;]
Other thing is, from what I know (correct me if I'm wrong), that game textures in most of main PC aren't the biggest part of game space. There are still models and audio. Probably the speech compression is the biggest problem of developers nowadays (from what I remember Bethesda had some problems with it and they were planning to release Oblivion on double layer).

Very few of the original textures are left in the copy of that game that I'm playing. Would the high res new textures that I've grabbed all over the place, the book jackets so on, can they all benefit from this tech too? That's something that will probably have to be looked at by the company that makes the tech and the game company trying to buy that feature for it's userbase.

Good point.

Post Scriptum: Sorry if my English isn't *that good* but I'm not a native speaker