What is DDS File?
The DDS file format is a raster image file, which means that it is made up of a grid of pixels. It was created by Microsoft for storing data compressed with S3 Texture Compression (S3TC). Initially, it was designed to be used with DirectX SDK for the development of real-time graphics rendering applications stored as a compressed file, which was then decompressed in the hardware by the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU).
A DDS file has a container format, which means it can store various types of data. However, it is mostly used to store texture data. The S3TC is a lossy compression algorithm, therefore a .DDS file may lose some of its quality between compression and decompression.
Download DDS Sample Files
You can download and use the .DDS sample files from below that are available in different sizes. Since each end-user can have different requirements for the size of a DDS file, you can pick one or perform your tests on all of them just to make sure.
