Low latency universal buffer compression and decompression for mobile graphics applications

Due to the thirst for bandwidth resource and the limitation of device size, mobile GPUs face more challenges than their desktop counterparts do when seeking realistic visual quality. To alleviate the severely restricted situation mobile GPUs in, we propose a new universal buffer compression method to handle both color and depth data with the same hardware unit. While the previous state-of-the-arts mainly focus on achieving high compression ratio but leave the decompression latency out of consideration, our method tends to reach a good compromise between two of them. Moreover, by adopting similar concept used in color/depth compression to DXT5 texture compression method, better quality can be achieved without introducing any decoding latency in retrieving a texel.