This isn't entirely correct. Nvidia GPUs can perform interpolation on 3D textures, which is specifically useful for performing finer distance queries on a 3D SDF.
But the author is correct in that this isn't specifically geared towards SDFs.
NVIDIA TMUs historically offered higher precision and about double the throughput as well as supported other edge cases such as sub pixel sampling much more effectively than AMD GPUs and at least recalling some failure states in low level APIs AMD seems to at least do certain things in shaders which were loaded by the driver when certain API functions were called rather than having native instructions for that.
I'm not sure the ISA even allows some "low precision internal calculations" mode on image samplers
Do you have any links you can share?
Or maybe we're talking past each other - bandwidth and interpolation requirements mean that lower precision does tend to be faster - even on nvidia. unorm8 is often the quoted "texels/second" precision, as to this day rgb888 is the "most common" texture format in games/apps/desktop environments. I think GCN had fp16/int16 at 1/2 that (I think RDNA increased that to 1/1), fp32/int32 at 1/4 and fp64 at 1/8. But that's pretty much the same as nvidia's texture filtering rates, abut I don't think there's a "hard cap" or internal limit of fp16 precision?
I'd prefer a 1 per byte entry option for higher detail, no need for any fancy modes, needs to be simply and fast to encode so it can be done realtime.
IDK about this post though, separating the block min/max into a separate memory location from the indices doesn't make much sense, you could just access a less detailed mip if that is what you want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_scalable_texture_comp...
For example, apparently support in OpenGL is simply not available.
https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/ASTC_Texture_Compression...