Talk:DirectDraw Surface

First post

Just thought this file format should get a fair mention. Anyone with some good links please post them. This article is too barebones right now.--n00b 23:07, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

"Though it was originally designed strictly for DirectX, a hack was later developed to use it with OpenGL as well." This makes no sense. OpenGL delibearately doesn't deal with file formats, only rendering, letting the programmer deal with file IO however they choose to. Support for the DXT compression method used within dds files is provided via the ARB_texture_compression extension. (see: http://developer.nvidia.com/attach/6585 )

This is not a hack. I'd like to either see a credible source for the above statement (which I'm willing to bet won't happen), or it should be removed. 82.71.7.193 21:51, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

I think that this file format should be added to the "Multimedia Compression Formats" list, both because it is a standardized format and because it is widely used. Especially considering it is one of, if not the, biggest user of DXTn compression. Any thoughts on this? --n00b 01:51, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Don't forget the GPU reference datatype DirectDrawSurface4. DirectDraw surface existed a long time before DirectX 7 but not as the file format. I searched for it in Wikipedia because I can't find how to release a DirectDrawSurface7 from the memory to avoid memory leaks in 2D games. Any links about that would improve this page a lot. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dawoodoz (talk • contribs) 11:59, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Usefulness of the format left poorly explained

Why is .dds good for storing cubic environment maps, particularly? Is it merely that the format can store several images as one file? And why does the fact that it's used for storing textures make it useful for storing S3TC compressed data? The "makes" part of that doesn't follow. Maybe the point is just that the format allows S3TC compression... in which case it's the other way round: The format allows this kind of compression, which (by design) makes it useful for storing textures. (I'd reword this, but I've never used .dds and I'm not confident I got my facts right.) Card Zero (talk) 18:58, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

I think it's usefulness comes from being a standard way of storing such information. That gives you an interoperability advantage and I believe that modern GPUs can consume .dds files natively, meaning you don't have to do any conversion before sending it to the graphic hardware. I suspect this is true for consoles as well.--Anss123 (talk) 21:10, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

OK, I thought about that a bit and swapped half of one sentence with half of the other, seems to work better. I also put in what you said about GPUs and consoles consuming DDS natively, although if I was really diligent I'd have found a citation for that, and I didn't. My statement that the hardware can "decompress" the data is a guess, for all I know it doesn't even need to (well, presumably it does, but the process is dead simple, which is the point of the format. "Fixed-rate data compression coupled with the single memory access", says the S3TC article). Card Zero (talk) 08:23, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

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Lossy

Should maybe mention that (currently) all of the DDS compression formats are lossy. ➧datumizer  ☎  17:36, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

MIME Type

The Internet media type for the format is listed as image/vnd-ms.dds, but it's not listed by the IANA. Lop Tyr (talk) 09:29, 10 April 2024 (UTC)