.DDS ファイル拡張子

Microsoft developed the DDS format to be used with the DirectX SDK to develop real-time rendering applications, mainly 3D games. Users often utilize the format to store model textures, mipmap levels, and cubemaps in 3D video games.

DDS was introduced in Microsoft DirectX 7.0 in March 2000, and subsequent versions introduced various improvements. Some of these improvements include support for volume textures in DirectX 8.0, arrays of textures in DirectX 10, new Direct3D texture formats in DirectX 11, and variable rate shading (VRS) in DirectX 12.

Since DDS is a container format, it can store various data types. However, the format typically stores texture data compressed with an S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) algorithm, which may be referred to as a DXTn texture.

The compression is a lossy compression, which means some quality is lost during the compression. However, the format provides fast load times since most computer video cards natively support the S3TC/DXTn compression method.