Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I was looking at the donkey kong country returns texture pack and it put PNG as the best quality but from my knowledge i thought that DDS was the best quality? Or is it just faster?

PNG has the best quality, but DDS is faster and uses less memory and has pretty good quality too.

There are some lossless DDS formats (which will be the same quality as a PNG) but the file size will end up bigger as those are uncompressed. They might be a little faster to load than PNGs, but on most machines, I doubt it would be enough of a benefit to outweigh the increased file size.

For most games on GC or Wii, I would guess that you will see little to no difference between PNG and DDS as far as quality goes, even only using BC3. Any sufficiently big texture resolution will more than make up for potential quality loss (higher resolution means better retention at higher compression; at 2048x1024, I can make a JPG that you almost certainly wouldn't be able to see any difference with compared to PNG, with a much smaller filesize). Plus, like has been said, DDS is much faster, won't *require* preloading (though it does still help a bit on a few games), and you can cut down on the file count using DDS because of the built-in mipmaps (which also help with texture load stuttering with preload turned off, too). All in all, I would say the benefits of DDS far outweigh any possible detriments.

Oh okay thank you all so much for all of the replies. So it really does depend on how the texture pack is made then? I would make my own texture pack but i can't really draw so i would use waifu2x or something but then it may be to close to the original source material

(05-11-2019, 05:42 AM)TomSea64 Wrote: [ -> ]Oh okay thank you all so much for all of the replies. So it really does depend on how the texture pack is made then? I would make my own texture pack but i can't really draw so i would use waifu2x or something but then it may be to close to the original source material

All Dolphin dumps is PNG, to make it easy to edit them (I think).  There's a utility that someone posted on a different section of the forum, here, that allows you to convert from PNG to DDS.  Waifu2x is certainly an option, but, like ESRGAN, I've found to be significantly lacking.  TopazLabs' Gigapixel AI, however, has been doing fantastic as a baseline for me.  It's paid (costs $99), but it has a 30-day trial, and it should be possible to bypass the 30 days if you know how.  And, in the end, I think it's worth it anyway.  I'll be releasing the first stage of my Metroid Prime Trilogy texture pack soon, and you can see what it's capable of there.