What is a texture decoder?

[xenoalien]

What is a texture decoder? I noticed on the download page that some of the build comments talked about a texture decoder.

[KHRZ]

Textures = images applied on polygons
decoder = decompresses something compressed (images are compressed to save memory usage/bandwidth etc)

[neobrain]

In terms of console emulation, decoding also refers to converting the textures from their native format to whatever format is nicer to handle with D3D or OpenGL. For example, many of the Wii's _uncompressed_ textures can't even be used directly via D3D since that API just doesn't expose these texture formats (and most GPUs most likely don't support it anyway). Thus, we need to convert those textures to a D3D-ish format first in order to use them.