To reliably distribute geospatial textures to diverse platforms and applications, Esri chose Khronos’ KTX 2.0, an efficient and lightweight GPU texture container format. KTX precisely specifies how the contents of a texture file are to be handled, from a simple base-level 2D texture to a cubemap array texture with mipmaps. KTX files also hold all the parameters needed for efficient texture loading into 3D APIs such as OpenGL and Vulkan, including access to individual mipmap levels. The latest version of the specification, KTX 2.0, adds support for Basis Universal supercompressed GPU textures - creating truly ‘Universal Textures’ that can be encoded once, are compact to transmit, and are efficient to process on any GPU across multiple platforms.

Imagination announces PVRTexTool now supports Basis Universal supercompressed textures as well as KTX™ 2.0 and .basis texture containers. This article serves as a brief overview of common asset delivery problems, and how KTX and Basis Universal aims to solve them.

I3S enables the streaming and storage of arbitrarily large amounts of 3D geographic data. I3S is web and cloud friendly and is rooted in modern standards and technological advancements in the areas of 3D graphics, data structuring, and mesh and texture compression. Version 1.2 of I3S includes support for supercompression of texture data using Basis Universal Texture supercompression in the Khronos KTX 2.0 texture container format, and advanced physically based materials that are feature compatible with the Khronos glTF 3D asset format standard.

Cesium released CesiumJS 1.83 and added support for KTX 2.0 and Basis Universal compressed textures, bringing transmission and runtime optimizations for global imagery. Cesium added support for glTF models with the KHR_texture_basisu extension and added support for 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit float KTX2 specular environment maps.

Today, The Khronos® Group announces the ratification of KTX™ 2.0, adding support for Basis Universal supercompression to this container format for reliable, ubiquitous distribution of GPU textures. Basis Universal is a compression technology developed by Binomial that produces compact textures that can be efficiently transcoded to a variety of GPU compressed texture formats at run-time. Additionally, Khronos has released the KHR_texture_basisu extension enabling glTF to contain KTX 2.0 textures, resulting in universally distributable glTF assets that reduce download size and use natively supported texture formats to reduce GPU memory size and boost rendering speed on diverse devices and platforms. Lastly, Khronos has released open source tools and transcoders, together with developer and artist guidelines, to enable and encourage widespread usage of KTX 2.0 textures throughout the glTF ecosystem, including the three.js, Babylon.js and Gestaltor viewers that have already integrated support.

The Khronos Group is looking for feedback on the latest draft of the KTX2 texture file format specification. Please review and comment on GitHub.

Qt 5.10 added support for ETC2 texture compression while for Qt 5.11 there is support for Khronos’ KTX texture container format. The KTX file format for OpenGL and OpenGL ES allows for supporting a wider-range of compression algorithms to suit more hardware/driver options. [source: Phoronix]

Pico Pixel has added support for Khronos Texture Format (KTX). Also new is an SDK that makes it very easy to capture the color or depth buffer of any OpenGL program and send it to Pico Pixel for visualization.

Version 2 adds support for ETC2 and EAC textures and conversion of legacy LUMINANCE* and INTENSITY* formats when loading in an OpenGL core context. It includes KTX loader tests for OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 3.3. In addition a couple of nasty bugs have been fixed including one in the KTX writer where image rows were not padded to 4 bytes as required by the spec. Complete details of the changes are located in the OpenGL ES SDK. A new version of toktx has also been released. New features are ability to create KTX files with textures in sized internal formats and defaulting to RED and RG formats for 1 and 2 channel textures. Naturally it incorporates the bug-fixed writer from libktx. Visit the KTX home page to download these tools.