Pavel Krajcevski and Dinesh Manocha over at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have produced several papers recently that have discussed ASTC. They had a paper at High Performance Graphics 2014: SegTC: Fast Texture Compression using Image Segmentation in which they start with a good introduction and review of the state of the art of compressed textures and in particular methods of actually compressing those textures to be used later on GPUs. Needless to say, they mention ASTC as a significant advance over existing methods, which made us rather proud. They then go on to discuss new methods of compression of textures, by first computing a segmentation of the image into superpixels to identify homogeneous areas based on a given metric and using that to define partitionings for partition-based compression formats, including ASTC.
Their recent paper has been accepted for the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games. In this paper with the catchy title of Compressed Coverage Masks for Path Rendering on Mobile GPUs, they look at methods of accelerating resolution-independent curve-rendering on mobile GPUs, preferably in real time. They find using ASTC to be a significant advance in this area, seeing good speed-ups overall from using the compressed coverage masks but also much bigger memory footprint (and bandwidth, and thus power) savings compared to older methods such as ETC2. For those interested, the list of other papers is here.
Both papers are highly readable, and I encourage you to have a look. It's clear there is more work to be done in this area, particularly research into more efficient ways of compressing images (and other data) into ASTC, and we look forward to seeing it.
Thanks for the links! I've just glanced over the coverage mask paper, and some of the ideas are interesting -- eg. I had never considered generating ASTC before, but such a technique could be very useful given the benefits. I'm looking forward to reading them in more depth.
Sean