Adaptive scalable texture compression

[1] Full details of ASTC were first presented publicly at the High Performance Graphics 2012 conference, in a paper by Olson et al. entitled "Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression".

[12] The method of compression is an evolution of Color Cell Compression with features including numerous closely spaced fractional bit rates, multiple color formats, support for high-dynamic-range (HDR) textures, and real 3D texture support.

The stated primary design goal for ASTC is to enable content developers to have better control over the space/quality tradeoff inherent in any lossy compression scheme.

With ASTC, the ratio between adjacent bit rates is of the order of 25%, making it less expensive to increase quality for a given texture.

ASTC allows a wide choice of input formats, including luminance-only, luminance-alpha, RGB, RGBA, and modes optimized for surface normals.

In the above table, the "Increment" column shows the additional storage required to store a texture using this bit rate, as compared to the next smallest.