High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The DirectDraw Surface file format (uses the filename extension DDS), from Microsoft, is a standard for storing data compressed with the lossy S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) algorithm, which can be decompressed in hardware by GPUs and consoles like the Playstation Portable, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. This makes the format useful for storing graphical textures and cubic environment maps as a data file, both compressed and uncompressed. The Microsoft Windows file extension for this data format is `.dds`.