Richard Geldreich's Blog

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

Saturday, June 13, 2026

XBC7 planning

I've been doing this for fun as a side project, as ASTC is still way more important. (ASTC is the most deployed GPU format in the world,...

Friday, June 12, 2026

XBC7/XUBC7 (supercompressed weight grid residual DCT+endpoint DPCM+Zstd) prototype is done

The next step is integration and connecting the BC7->ASTC LDR 4x4, ETC1, etc. transcoders into place in the Basis Universal library. Bitr...

Tuesday, June 9, 2026

Intra-Residual Weight Grid DCT/DST for BC7/ASTC

This GPU texture supercompression method for weights (or "indices", or "selectors") uses neighboring blocks to predict t...

Thursday, June 4, 2026

"Shrek" Xbox

“Shrek” was a launch title for the original Xbox that I worked on 25 years ago (in 2001). It was the first shipped game to use a technique...

Saturday, May 30, 2026

Basis Universal v2.5 with in-loop deblocking: shipping soon

We're feature complete. We're now on the downslope to shipping support for in-loop deblocking using a simple standardized reconstruc...

Thursday, May 7, 2026

bug found in Intel's ASTC compressor (part of ispc_texcomp)

I've ported Intel's ASTC compressor (in ispc_texcomp) to pure C for benchmarking and discovered this gem during the process. The swa...

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

Block blurring (prefiltering)

Modern GPU texture compressors have a secret (but dangerous) superpower: prefiltering (blurring). Sometimes an encoder way overfits edges, c...

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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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