PVRTC format compromises image quality

Question

To develop games for the iPhone, I switched from PNG to PVRTC for performance. But PVRTC compression destroys image quality. I use spritesheets with transparencies to animate characters .. and pvrtc makes the edges look dirty around the character next to transparencies.

I read that pvrtc cannot handle edges and that's it .. but is there a solution? Can we do something with these images, because at least there will be these dirty borders around the character.

Sankar

Answer 1

Thanks for the comments. I actually used this tool called PVRTexTool from Imaging Technology . And that seemed to help a lot. This tool allowed pre-processing in which I used the Bleed Texture option with RGB (0,0,0) on a PNG file and then created a PVR using this. As a result, PVR was of much better quality.

Of course, this is not as perfect as PNG, but .. you cannot have a cake and eat it too.

Sankar

Answer 2

PVRTC is a lossy compression algorithm algorithm - this will cause compression artifacts. If you cannot or do not want to deal with this, do not use it. See if you can find other places in your game for optimization.