Best .dds format for clothes/armor textures?

[Nalim]

Best .dds format for clothes/armor textures?

 

I dont really know what is most suitible to get a balance between quality and performance, any pros here that can give suggestions?

[Tom21]

Low End Ones Work Best For ME whin i use High 2k, 4k my game just go's to hell!

[cefwyn]

DXT1 is the best that Skyrim supports for textures without an alpha channel while DXT3 is best for textures that need sharp alphas. DXT5 is for textures that need a smooth transition between alpha values.

[roy12]

Skyrim supports other format which are not DXT. It supports ARGB unsigned 32 bpp, I think that's uncompressed. So if you find even DXT5 is giving you too much artifacts, use uncompressed.

 

I have not tried other formats though.

[cefwyn]

Yeah, I've forgotten to mention uncompressed DDS. If you make the image uncompressed however you must be sure to generate mipmaps otherwise it will reduce performance in game significantly because either Skyrim has to generate those mipmaps (if the engine does this), or all mipmap levels will be at the highest quality which can really kill performance. I use uncompressed DDS for the diffuse and normal textures and then DXT1 for things like specular maps. It's unfortunate that graphics cards don't support something other then S3TC\DDS compression because it really does trash image quality. If the engine supported YCoCg color palettes I would say use that because the image quality is considerably better than with basic DXT5 but unfortunately the engine doesn't support that.

[thatTESguy]

For normals, 8.8.8 uncompressed at half res can work well. DXT1 usually is worse at things with smooth gradients (skin, for instance) in my experience. Can't see the difference with things like armors, walls, etc.