Fallout 3 uses DDS and TGA textures easily. TGA's are easier for me to use. So my question is...

Is there a specific reason (or reasons), to use one format over the other?

TGA's are bigger, but easier [for me] to edit.

~ Are textures stored in Vram compressed?
(meaning, is there a speed hit for using TGA's instead of DXT's?)

If anyone has some experience with this please shed some light on it.

As far as I am concearned, we have to use DDS because that is what the game engine uses. I think the specific compression rate and filetype fits the optimization of the engine the best, and dds are also rather small so they picked them.

Its because, 1, they are smaller file sizes which is important for performance of the overall game, so your video card isnt bogged down by swapping needed textures through the vram, and they offer better overall quality then TGA.

Just get an image editing program with DDS support, like photoshop, GIMP, or Paint.NET. PS and GIMP need a plugin though as its not a natural format they can read.

Well, DDS is smaller and faster. And TGA is easier to edit.

Yes, DDS textures are compressed in the VRAM so less video card RAM is needed to use DDS textures, and it's faster too cause the graphic cards been optimised towards this format in the past decade.

Yea provided you have a program with the necissary plugins like Echonite said, dds are just as easy to edit as any other texture format.

Good enough reasons for me

I use Photoshop CS1 and have the Nvidia plugins, but I use Irfanview a lot, and it doesn't save as DDS yet.

I'll keep doing what I have been, then... which is working with TGA's until its time to export the final artwork.

Thank you each, for the information :goodjob:

Yea, I work with png's or just gimp xfc files. Then once I am done, I export it as .dds then actually use that as the texture file. It makes it easier to change later on, as dds does not support layers, so my Gimp xfc will be what I actually edit, then I'll export again and overwrite the dds.