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JPG TGA DDS Viewer Recommendations

Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2005 7:22 pm
by obsidian
Anyone know of a small, lightweight program that will allow me to preview a large number of jpg, tga, and dds file formats. I'm using IrfanView ATM, but doesn't seem to support DDS. I have DDS support for Photoshop, but it's overkill for just previewing stuff.

Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2005 8:05 pm
by Plan B

Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2005 8:16 pm
by Scourge
I have Irfanview 3.97 and it shows support for DDS. Need to update?

Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2005 9:47 pm
by Todtsteltzer
scourge34 wrote:I have Irfanview 3.97 and it shows support for DDS. Need to update?
Same here.

Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2005 10:26 pm
by Kat
Todtsteltzer wrote:
scourge34 wrote:I have Irfanview 3.97 and it shows support for DDS. Need to update?
Same here.
'Yes' and 'No'. Most DXT1 and DXT3 DDS textures can be viewed in any DDS viewer *but* there appears to be an exception; ATI's DXT5 RxGB format used for compressing localmaps for D3/Q4 use.

If you've never used ATI's Compressonator before then read the tutorial I posted the other day, right now that appears to be the only app that *views* images compressed with RxGB (aside from D3 et-al). I've not extensively tested which viewers see which DDS image type because there are a shit load of different compression algorithms that can be used to create DDS.

http://www.quake3bits.com/htm/tutorials ... onator.htm

Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2005 2:52 am
by obsidian
Thanks Plan B, forgot about that nVidia thumbnail plugin.

I'm using Irfanview 3.97, but as Kat says, it doesn't seem to load all DDS files, namely the ones I need, which are D3/Q4 files.

Thanks Kat for the article.

Downloaded the Windows Texture Viewer program off the nVidia website and associated DDS files with it. So now all other files open in Irfanview and DDS files in WTV. Good enough for me.

Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2005 3:33 am
by Scourge
Ahh, I see. I didn't know there was a difference. Sorry. :)

Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2005 4:01 am
by Kat
No need to apologise!

I didn't know there was a difference either until I looked into it a bit more before doing the tute. I've been doing a fair bit of texture work and needed to get the DDS stuff sorted out. :icon25: