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ASTC Evaluation Codec now on GitHub

Lorenzo Dal Col
1 minute read time.

The evaluation codec for Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) technology is now available on GitHub, making it easier for you to access, browse and contribute feedback. Previously the ASTC codec was released as a ZIP archive, including the source code and example binaries, however we wanted to use GitHub to bring ASTC to the heart of the developer open-source community.

What is ASTC technology?

ASTC technology developed by ARM and AMD is an official extension to both the OpenGL and OpenGL ES graphics APIs. ASTC is a major step forward in terms of image quality, reducing memory bandwidth and thus energy use. It is the outcome of many years of research, development and engineering, and it is now implemented in a number of GPUs across the whole industry.

ASTC is widely supported by all major hardware vendors and it is free to use. Google’s Android Extension Pack (GL_ANDROID_extension_pack_es31a) also requires support for ASTC. If you are a game developer, Unreal Engine 4 and Unity 4.3 already support ASTC and for those of you building your own game engine, you can clone the GitHub repository to start using ASTC yourself.

A number of cutting-edge developer tools also support ASTC such as:

  • ARM Mali GPU Texture Compression Tool – can compress and decompress textures to ASTC, show the preview and let you experiment with different parameters and block sizes.
  • OpenGL ES Emulator – an OpenGL ES library for desktop PCs lets you experiment with ASTC textures even where they are not supported in hardware.
  • Mali Graphics Debugger – can trace, capture and visualize ASTC textures used by your application.

For the technical details on ASTC, please refer to the blog posts by Tom Olson and Sean Ellis.

Why is this now on GitHub?

With the source code available on GitHub, it is even easier for every developer to access, clone, browse and contribute feedback and improvements. Since ASTC is a standard, the whole community benefits from it, and there is now a straightforward way to share fixes and new features.

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  • I do not know what Karl is doing at the moment, but it's no doubt something amazing and very fast, which pushes the limit of technology.

    ...This is just the beginning. This technology will cause that mobile phones will start having two cameras (or one camera and a prism or mirror), so that it can capture 3D objects just by moving the phone around an object.

    Because of the very good compression, it'll be possible to transfer the "3D objects" immediately to a server, which are processing them. One could then immediately use a 3D printer to print out a miniature version of the captured object (or if the original object is very small, perhaps an upscaled version, so it's easier to see details).

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  • I do not know what Karl is doing at the moment, but it's no doubt something amazing and very fast, which pushes the limit of technology.

    ...This is just the beginning. This technology will cause that mobile phones will start having two cameras (or one camera and a prism or mirror), so that it can capture 3D objects just by moving the phone around an object.

    Because of the very good compression, it'll be possible to transfer the "3D objects" immediately to a server, which are processing them. One could then immediately use a 3D printer to print out a miniature version of the captured object (or if the original object is very small, perhaps an upscaled version, so it's easier to see details).

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