Microsoft has licensed certain texture compression technologies from graphics card maker, S3, for its upcoming DirectX 6.0.

　　S3's texture compression algorithm allows textures to be stored in one-fourth to one-sixth the space normally required while still retaining great image quality. Microsoft's interest in the technology indicates that it believes that texture compression will be a critical feature for 3D accelerators in 1998 - and that the S3 solution is a cost effective one.

　　"Incorporating S3's algorithm into DirectX will empower content developers to better utilize the bandwidth and storage available on mainstream PCs, which will allow them to write more complex and visually compelling 3D games," said Kevin Bachus, product manager for DirectX at Microsoft.

　　The licensing agreement will make the compression algorithm the preferred standard for DirectX APIs.

　　"By incorporating S3's texture compression technology into DirectX 6.0 and endorsing just one compression method, life is greatly simplified for application developers," said John Brothers, vice president of architecture and software at S3, in a statement.

　　"Now, textures can be compressed at author-time and shipped in compressed format. Without a common API with texture compression, incorporating this feature would be impractical. And texture compression is clearly an important feature in graphics solutions that texture from system memory using an accelerated graphics port (AGP). Bus and memory speed are just half of the performance equation. The other half is to make efficient use of the bandwidth and storage that you do have."

　　Normally, graphics in games need to be limited in size and complexity due to bandwidth capacity and performance of the system processing the graphics. Microsoft says that with S3's compression and AGP, bandwidth could effectively increase by 16 to 24 times. This number is derived from the fact that AGP, in theory, quadruples the speed at which graphics data can be read from your system's memory and the underlying PCI bus.