As part of their new technology, 3dfx has unveiled their new FXT1 texture compression (thanks Dennis Smith). This is an open source technology, meaning anyone can download the source code, and it works under Glide, OpenGL, and Direct3D (meaning it's not limited to 3dfx cards). Here's an excerpt from their developer's site that explains it somewhat.

FXT1 texture compression provides equal to or better compression ratios than any available hardware compression scheme and is supported on all future 3dfx products. With up to four compression schemes used in the encoding of each texture, FXT1 provides the most accurate texture compression available, providing little or no loss in image quality. Decoding FXT1 textures can be done transparently in the 3D hardware at run-time, or decoded in software and converted to another hardware-supported texture format.