What is a DDS file?

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DDS file format was created by Microsoft and is associated with Direct Draw Surface.

DDS format was first introduced with DirectX 7.0 in September 1999. Over the years, DDS file format was updated and extended. With DirectX 8.0 support for volume textures was added, with Direct3D 10 was allowed an array of textures to be included. DDS file format is container format for storing data, compressed with S3 Texture Compression algorithm and can be decompressed in hardware by Graphic Processing Unit (GPU).

Because this format is useful for storing graphical textures and cubical environmental maps as data files, compressed and uncompressed, commonly is used in gaming development for enhancing user's gameplay experience.

How to open DDS files?

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DDS Viewer is a free for use software tool. DDS Viewer can be used to open Microsoft DirectDraw Surface files, display image preview and provide options to convert, resize and save them in other most known image file formats as .jpg, .gif, .png and others.
DDS format was created by Microsoft and introduced with DirectX 7.0. It is used for storing textures and environments, compressed and uncompressed pixel formats and can be used for storing Windows desktop backgrounds and wallpapers.

DDS or DirectDraw Surface today is a standard for storing data, compressed with S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) algorithm. This makes the format useful for storing graphical textures and cubic environment maps as a data file.

What DDS Viewer can do?

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• Zoom In/Out:
  You can zoom in/out both with mouse and with slider control.
• Rotate image
  Rotating image can be done 90 degrees clockwise or counter-clockwise, just with clicking on arrow toolbars.
• Pan image
  Pan image with the mouse.
• Resize image
  On the top toolbar you can see the original image size. The original size can be changed and the image can be resized with inserting new size parameters.
• Convert image
  Opened DDS image file can be converted/saved in other image format as JPEG(.jpg), Bitmap(.bmp), PNG(.png), GIF(.gif) and TIFF(.tiff).