Richard Geldreich's Blog

Co-owner of Binomial LLC, working on GPU texture interchange. Open source developer, graphics programmer, former video game developer. Worked previously at SpaceX (Starlink), Valve, Ensemble Studios (Microsoft), DICE Canada.

Wednesday, March 4, 2026

Degenerate but valid ASTC configs: suboptimal CEM encodings

See: https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal/wiki/List-of-Available-Software-ASTC-Decoders#degenerate-but-valid-astc-configs

Updated: "ASTC GPU Texture Decoding: Software Decoders, Spec Issues, and ARM Errata"

ASTC's complexity has created an ecosystem where correctness is an ongoing research problem rather than a fully solved one. See: https:...

Sunday, March 1, 2026

.ASTC (the File Format): No Longer a Black Box

The basisu command line tool has a new option, -peek , which opens any standard ARM LDR/HDR .ASTC texture file , unpacks each block, and...

Monday, February 23, 2026

ASTC Decoding: Software Decoders, Spec Issues, and ARM Errata

See here: https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal/wiki/List-of-Available-Software-ASTC-Decoders

Sunday, February 22, 2026

ARM ASTC Decoding Errata

See here: https://documentation-service.arm.com/static/67ca1a5ece2747241fced502 More general info on the real-world complexities of decoding...

Wednesday, February 18, 2026

Some things we've learned about GPU textures at planetary scale

1. ASTC is now the king : In billions of devices. Everything else=fallback, including BC7. To us, BC7 is essentially a greatly simplified AS...

The Three Generations of GPU Texture Distribution

In the Basis Universal v2.0 wiki: https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal/wiki/The-Three-Generations-of-GPU-Texture-Distribution

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About Me

Rich Geldreich: Seattle, WA, United States; Back in the day I worked for several years at Digital Illusions on things like the first shipping deferred shaded game ("Shrek" - 2001), software renderers, and game AI. Then, after working for Microsoft at Ensemble Studios for 5 years as engine lead on Halo Wars, I took a year off to create "crunch", an advanced DXTc texture compression library. I then worked 5 years at Valve, where I contributed to Portal 2, Dota 2, CS:GO, and the Linux versions of Valve's Source1 games. I was one of the original developers on the Steam Linux team, where I worked with a (somewhat enigmatic) multi-billionare on proving that OpenGL could still hold its own vs. Direct3D. I also started the vogl (Valve's OpenGL debugger) project from scratch, which I worked on for over a year. In my spare time I work on various open source lossless and texture compression projects: crunch, LZHAM, miniz, jpeg-compressor, and picojpeg.

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