Quote: I always use 24-bit TGA to eliminate color banding artifacts associated with 16-bit. I don't know if DDS would be a better solution for video memory purposes, though.
Yes it would. The disadvantage would be that you could have visible artifacts due to its native directX compression, but the outstanding advantage is that the filesize is minmalistic against bmpa,tga and pcx on the HD AND the video memory (TGA and PCX, though run-length encoded, are extracted to the memory like bmaps, so there is no memory saving aspect in here for them). If you use for your models only tgas and you replace them with DDS you can cut down the loading time with a ratio up to 1:5... and when your textures are DDS as well it will decreased as well.
