Idea for next texture compression experiment

Right now, I've got a GPU texture in a simple ETC1 subset that is easily converted to most other GPU formats:

Base color: 15-bits, 5:5:5 RGB
Intensity table index: 3-bits
Selectors: 2-bits/texel

Most importantly, this is a "single subset" encoding, using BC7 terminology. BC7 supports between 1-3 subsets per block. A subset is just a colorspace line represented by two R,G,B endpoint colors.

This format is easily converted to DXT1 using a table lookup. It's also the "base" of the universal GPU texture format I've been thinking about, because it's the data needed for DXT1 support. The next step is to experiment with attempting to refine this base data to better take advantage of the full ETC1 specification. So let's try adding two subsets to each block, with two partitions (again using BC7 terminology), top/bottom or left/right, which are supported by both ETC1 and BC7.

For example, we can code this base color, then delta code the 2 subset colors relative to this base. We'll also add a couple more intensity indices, which can be delta coded against the base index. Another bit can indicate which ETC1 block color encoding "mode" should be used (individual 4:4:4 4:4:4 or differential 5:5:5 3:3:3) to represent the subset colors in the output block.

In DXT1 mode, we can ignore this extra delta coded data and just convert the basic (single subset) base format. In ETC1/BC7/ASTC modes, we can use the extra information to support 2 subsets and 2 partitions.

Currently, the idea is to share the same selector indices between the single subset (DXT1) and two subset (BC7/ASTC/full ETC1) encodings. This will constrain how well this idea works, but I think it's worth trying out.

To add more quality to the 2 subset mode, we can delta code (maybe with some fancy per-pixel prediction) another array of selectors in some way. We can also add support for more partitions (derived from BC7's or ASTC's), too.