Online browser based tool to convert DDS (Microsoft DirectDraw Surface) files to PNG (Portable Network Graphics) files.
Simple Drag and Drop browser based tool lets you easily convert your files.
Microsoft created the .dds file format in 1999 for use with DirectX 7.0. It is used to store texture data directly in formats supported by DirectX. This design allows for quickly loading the data to the GPU. As no processing is needed to convert the texture data when loading. Originally designed to support the S3 compressed texture format. The specification has evolved to include other formats and support new features. With DirectX 10.0 support for arrays of textures was added. As the format has existed for so long and is so useful for graphics programs. Its usage is very wide spread through games and visual software. Also as use of the GPU in modern computing has increased for many tasks, more usages for it are always being found.
Inside the file is a file signature and header to identify it is the dds file format. Then another value to specify the texture format. This is followed by the texture data. DDS was designed to support uncompressed and compressed texture formats. It supports lots of uncompressed pixel layouts with various color channel and bit depth combinations. With support for color RGB channels. As well as some formats to store luminance data, with or without alpha. The only compressed format defined in the specification is the S3 compressed texture format. This is defined with a few different styles described as DXT versions 1 to 5. These versions encode the data in slight different ways and produce various levels of image quality. Some independent hardware vendors have also extended this specification to support there own texture compression technologies. This is done by defining their own format codes. These are non standard though and will require specific hardware and drivers to be supported.