Hardware Image Compression
- Auto-discovered
Ignacio Castaño
Visit resource ↗Description
Hardware Image Compression is a technical blog article by Ignacio Castaño.
Technical blog post by Ignacio Castaño comparing transparent hardware image compression formats - Apple Metal lossy, ARM AFRC, and Imagination PVRIC4 - against real-time codecs from his Spark library. Covers API enablement, quality (RMSE) and throughput measurements, and format internals for graphics programmers evaluating framebuffer and texture compression. One of the things I've always lamented about hardware image formats is the slow pace.
It is aimed at advanced graphics programmers and matches the audience implied by Ignacio Castaño's other work.
The article is a free HTML blog post meant to be read in one sitting, with diagrams or code snippets embedded in the page.
It is useful when you want practical detail beyond a title or store listing and prefer primary-source explanation from the author or maintainer.
Related resources
- A gentle introduction to shaders (Alan Zucconi)
Alan Zucconi's A gentle introduction to shaders in Unity3D (June 2015) is part one of his Gentle Introduction series on alanzucconi.com, aimed at Unity developers new to GPU programs. It connects vertices, materials, and shaders in Unity's pipeline, covering ShaderLab Properties and SubShader layout, inspector uniforms, Queue tags, ZTest, and the surface-versus-vertex/fragment split for lighting versus effects. Little prior shader knowledge is assumed; fixed-function shaders are skipped as obsolete.
100% match · <blog><about><article><free><programmers><real><source><technical> - A Look at Spyro's Portals - Rendering the Background
Daniel Pokladek's November 2020 post begins a Unity series on Spyro Reignited portal shaders, focusing on the background visible through the opening while later installments cover
100% match · <blog><always><article><free><programmers><real><technical><things> - Alexander Ameye
's blog at ameye.dev (alexanderameye.github.io) is a static Eleventy site documenting Unity graphics engineering experiments. Sixteen indexed notes explain URP scriptable render passes, Shader Graph stylized water, realtime caustics, cavity and halftone effects, hemisphere sampling, holographic cards, and several outline methods.
100% match · <blog><about><article><free><programmers><real><technical><time> - Believable Caustics Reflections (Alan Zucconi)
Believable Caustics Reflections is Alan Zucconi's September 2019 Unity blog post on faking pool-style ripple caustics without ray tracing, sparked by Florian Gelzenleuchter's popular shader GIF. One tileable texture is sampled twice in a Surface shader at different scales and scroll speeds, combined with min(), then tinted onto albedo with slight RGB UV offsets for dispersion. The walkthrough covers _ST tiling, _Time animation, HDR albedo above 1.0, and Post Processing Stack v2 bloom.
100% match · <blog><article><free><one><post><programmers><real><technical> - Blending Meshes into Terrain (Inresin)
Louis Waloschek's April 2020 Inresin tutorial blends static meshes into Unity Terrain using baked depth masks and Amplify surface shaders.
100% match · <code><advanced><blog><article><covers><free><one><programmers> - Blur Renderer Feature Example/Template for URP / Unity 2021.2 (Alexander Ameye)
Custom Render Passes in Unity is Alexander Ameye's July 2021 ameye.dev note on URP ScriptableRendererFeature and ScriptableRenderPass boilerplate, heavily commented where Unity SRP documentation still feels sparse. The sample applies a two-pass box blur: blit camera color to a temporary buffer, blur vertically then horizontally, with adjustable strength and downsampling.
100% match · <code><blog><about><api><article><free><programmers><real> - Branching on a GPU (Jason Booth, Dec 2021)
Branching on a GPU is Jason Booth's December 2021 Medium essay on when shader branches help or hurt on modern GPUs.
100% match · <blog><about><article><free><programmers><real><technical><things> - BruteForceGame
Matthieu Houllier's Brute Force studio blog documenting Crumble, a Unity physics platformer released on Steam in late 2020. Devlogs walk through shipped shaders: shell grass ben
100% match · <blog><article><free><image><practical><technical><want><work> - Deferred Shading (CatlikeCoding)
Rendering 13 on Catlike Coding is Jasper Flick's chapter on Unity deferred shading, part of the Built-in RP Rendering series (Unity 5.5).
100% match · <advanced><blog><about><always><article><free><programmers><real> - Easing Functions
Easings.net is a free interactive cheat sheet by Andrey Sitnik and Ivan Solovev for choosing easing functions that control how a parameter changes over normalized animation time. The catalog lists quad, cubic, quart, quint, exponential, circular, elastic, and bounce curves in ease-in, ease-out, and ease-in-out forms.
100% match · <blog><article><free><page><programmers><real><slow><technical> - Parallax Mapping (CatlikeCoding)
Catlike Coding’s Rendering series part 20 adds parallax mapping to the custom “My First Lighting Shader” track (Unity 2017.1), closing the gap with Standard shader height features. Explains why normal maps alone lack view-dependent parallax, then implements offset mapping and ray-marched height-field intersection with adjustable step counts on a test quad. Builds on earlier parts (lighting, shadows, instancing).
100% match · <blog><about><article><free><programmers><real><technical><things> - Patreon > Team Dogpit (aka Xibanya)
Team Dogpit (Xibanya) publishes “Shaders For People Who Don’t Know How To Shader,” a Patreon-first series that assumes no prior Unity or programming background. Each lesson introduces one skill - colors, normal maps, rim light, deferred buffers, SDFs, raymarching - then walks through a complete shader.
100% match · <blog><about><article><free><post><programmers><read><real> - Physically Based Values for CG Artists
Rows cover metals, dielectrics, organics, and fluids with sRGB swatches and numeric F0/reflectance fields suited to Substance, Blender, or engine neutral workflows.
100% match · <blog><about><api><article><free><programmers><real><technical> - second post discussing 3D
BorisTheBrave’s 2018 post is the 3D installment of a marching-cubes series on smooth destructible terrain.
100% match · <blog><article><evaluating><free><post><programmers><real><technical> - Shader Fundamentals (CatlikeCoding)
Rendering 2: Shader Fundamentals is Jasper Flick's second Catlike Coding Unity tutorial on how meshes become pixels.
100% match · <blog><about><article><free><programmers><real><technical><texture> - Simon Trümpler / Simonschreibt
Simon Trümpler’s Simonschreibt.de is a long-running German/English technical art blog covering stylized environments, hand-painted texturing, Substance workflows, and shader-adjace
100% match · <blog><about><article><free><programmers><real><technical><time> - Voronoi Maps (Red Blob Games)
Amit Patel (Red Blob Games) interactive Voronoi map tutorial builds region diagrams step-by-step with JavaScript demos - ideal for understanding Lloyd relaxation, biomes, and proce
100% match · <blog><about><article><free><page><programmers><real><technical> - Vulkan Hardware Database Quick Filters
Blog post about replacing the Vulkan Hardware Database global pre-filters with in-place quick filters on every view.
100% match · <code><blog><about><api><covers><format><hardware><post> - Neural Texture Compression in Metal 4
Technical write-up of MetalNTC, a Neural Texture Compression implementation for Apple Silicon based on NVIDIA random-access neural material compression.
100% match · <code><advanced><blog><apple><compression><covers><metal><quality> - Metal Lossy Compression Format
Technical reverse-engineering of Apple's undocumented Metal lossy texture compression (A15/M2), which offers roughly 1:2 compression transparent to applications.
100% match · <code><optimization><advanced><blog><castano><apple><compression><format>