Ah OK, yes, PVR1 was 1996 tech. I thought you were talking about PVR2.
I can only assume that Neon 250 inherited VQTC from Dreamcast, with the possible exception of palette texture compression (which wouldn’t really be needed much on PC anyway).
leileilol wrote on 2024-04-27, 18:04:
how are rgb565/ argb1555 / argb4444 paletted formats? Furthermore the official PVR PS plugin doesn't support indexed colors. Even if there were actual lossy VQ compression applied to indexed color, it'd look very ugly with blocky miscolored ringing, and stripey.
Based on what I’ve seen from homebrew devs, my understanding is that DC’s VQTC can compress both RGB (16-bit) and paletted formats (8-bit as well as 4-bit). 512 x 512 / 1024x1024 textures can be compressed, rectangular textures can also be compressed. The size of a VQ compressed texture on DC is always 1/8 the size of an uncompressed one of the same format + the codebook overhead (which is typically 2kB but can be lowered, if needed, at the cost of texture quality).
This seems very useful given that RAM is always a precious resource on home consoles. Even more so on a TBDR machine where you also need room for a "scene buffer".