The DirectDraw Surface (.dds) file format, from Microsoft, is used for storing textures and cubic environment maps, both compressed and uncompressed. This makes the format useful for storing DXTn compressed data used in GPUs and consoles like the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.
History
This format was introduced with DirectX 7.0. In DirectX 8.0, support for volume textures was added. Though it was originally designed for DirectX, it can also be used in OpenGL as well via the ARB_texture_compression extension.
