Dreamcast homebrew devs were surprised by this too. But yes, apparently, even non-square textures can be compressed. However, this seems to come with a caveat (i.e. incompatibility with mip-mapping). Essentially, a rectangular texture with mip-maps can not be compressed. On the other hand, a …

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). how are rgb565/ argb1555 / argb4444 paletted formats? …

3Dfx and PoweVR had texture compression before S3TC. S3TC was 1998. Then, 3dfx had a very unused YUV422 format (SGI legacy baggage), and PowerVR had a broken implementation of RGB332 and I don't think they compare to what S3TC had brought. They also both had hard 256x256 texture limits so they …

EMBM always fascinated me, probably because it feels more "unexplored" compared to other types of bump mapping. As I understand it, the tech behind EMBM can essentially be described as "natively-provided perturbation/displacement of texture coordinates per-pixel". This sounds like a super-cool …