The DirectDraw Surface container file format is a Microsoft format for storing data compressed with the previously proprietary S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) algorithm,[2] which can be decompressed in hardware by GPUs.
This makes the format useful for storing graphical textures and cubic environment maps as a data file, both compressed and uncompressed.
[3] The file extension for this data format is '.dds'.
In DirectX 8.0, support for volume textures was added.
[5] Initial DDS support landed in GIMP 2.10.10 released on April 4, 2019.