USAGE OF BC7 CONTAINER FOR STORING TEXTURES WITH 10-BIT COLOR DEPTH
High color depth images can more accurately reproduce colors and smooth color transitions without banding artifacts, especially for wide color gamut devices. The paper deals with texture compression with 10-bit color depth applied in 3D graphics. A method for storing of such textures in standard BC7 blocks is proposed. The example of BC7 block applicable for storing of smooth texture information with an accuracy exceeding 8-bit is also given. The proposed approach has a backward compatibility with current hardware. Additional hardware cost to support 10-bit decoding is expected to be low. An overview of developed software for compressor based on bc7_gpu is given. Comparison of PSNR and RMSE shows that the proposed compressor provides better quality for 10-bit textures; compressing errors become less for images with high color depth.