More thoughts on a universal GPU texture interchange format

Just some random thoughts:

I still think the idea of a universal GPU texture compression standard is fascinating and useful. Something that can be efficiently transcoded to 2 or more major vendor formats, without sacrificing too much along the quality or compression ratio axes. Developers could just encode to this standard interchange format and ship to a large range of devices without worrying about whether GPU Y supports arcane texture format Z. (This isn't my idea, it's from Won Chun at RAD.)

Imagine, for example, a format that can be efficiently transcoded to ASTC, with an alternate mode in the transcoder that outputs BC7 as a fallback. Interestingly, imagine if this GPU texture interchange format looked a bit better (and/or transcoded more quickly) when transcoded into one of the GPU formats verses the other. This situation seems very possible in some of the designs of a universal format I've been thinking about.

Now imagine, in a few years time, a large set of universal GPU textures gets used and stored by developers, and distributed into the wild on the web. Graphics or rendering code samples even start getting distributed using this interchange format. A situation like this would apply pressure to the other GPU vendor with the inferior format to either dump their format or create a newer format more compatible with efficient transcoding.

To put it simply, a universal format could help fix this mess of GPU texture formats we have today.