(also known as BC4 or Block Compression 4) can compress textures, i.e. light maps, shadow maps, HDR textures and material properties. 3Dc+ provides 2:1 compression ratio with single component (DXT5 alpha) 8-bit integer textures and 4:1 compression ratio with normal maps and textures consisting of two 8-bit integer components References Microsoft Developer Network article on Block Compression in Direct3D 10 What is a Normal Map? CREATING AND USING NORMAL MAPS Creating Normal Maps 3Dc - higher quality textures with better compression Texture compression Open file formats Lossy compression algorithms 3D graphics software