DirectDraw Surface

Writable

image

The DirectDraw Surface file format was introduced with DirectX 7 to store uncompressed and compressed textures. The file format supports mipmaps, cube maps, and volume maps.

Identify it

Extensions	`.dds`
MIME types	`image/vnd-ms.ddsimage/x-direct-draw-surface`
Signatures	`444453207c000000` at byte 0 (DirectDraw Surface) `44445320` at byte 0
PRONOM	`fmt/1040`
Wikidata	`Q741654`

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Open it

DevILOpen sourcereads and writes · GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1
ImageMagickOpen sourcereads and writes · ImageMagick License
Visualization LibraryOpen sourcereads and writes · BSD licenses
AbydosOpen sourcereads · GNU Lesser General Public License
ConverseenOpen sourcereads · GNU General Public License, version 3.0
GodotOpen sourcereads · MIT License
imageioOpen sourcereads · 2-clause BSD License
OpenImageIOOpen sourcereads · BSD licenses
Q130252332Open sourcereads · Apache Software License 2.0 / Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International / MIT License
DirectDrawreads and writes
Konvertorreads and writes
Photopeareads and writes
Q650922reads and writes · freeware / proprietary license
ABViewerreads
Axialis IconWorkshopreads
IrfanViewreads · freeware
L3DTreads
TrueSpace 6.5reads

Convert it

To	With	Fidelity	Command and losses
Portable Network Graphics	ImageMagick	Lossless	`convert in.dds out.png` Pixels kept; some metadata, colour profiles or layers may be dropped.
Tagged Image File Format	ImageMagick	Lossless	`convert in.dds out.tif` Pixels kept; some metadata, colour profiles or layers may be dropped.
GIF 89a	ImageMagick	Lossy	`convert in.dds out.gif` Reduced to 256 colours.
JPEG File Interchange Format 1.02	ImageMagick	Lossy	`convert in.dds out.jpg` Lossy compression.
WebP	ImageMagick	Lossy	`convert in.dds out.webp` Lossy compression.

Sources

From Converters (FFmpeg, ImageMagick, Pandoc, LibreOffice), Just Solve the File Format Problem (File Formats Wiki), PRONOM, Wikidata. Updated 2026-10-24.

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