Driconf: enabling S3 texture compression on Linux

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Update: the DXTC patent expired on 2018-03-16, many distros enable this by default now.

S3TC (also known as DXTn or DXTC) is a patented lossy texture compression algorithm. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3TC for more detailed information. Many games use S3TC and if you use Wine to play games you definitely want to enable it if your graphics card supports it.

Because this algorithm was patented it is disabled by default on many Linux distributions.

To enable it you can install the library "libtxc" if your favorite OS has not installed it already.

For easy configuration you can install the optional utility DRIconf, which you can find at: https://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DriConf. DriConf can safely be removed after configuration.

Steps to enable it

Install libtxc_dxtn:

ArchLinux:

# pacman -S libtxc_dxtn

Debian:

# aptitude install libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0

Install driconf (optional):

ArchLinux:

# pacman -S driconf

Debian:

# aptitude install driconf

Run driconf and enable S3TC:

Screenshot of DRIconf window and its options

Additional links