What program opens a .dds file?

paint.net with its DDS support, GIMP, or XnView MP for viewing. Standard image viewers cannot read DDS because it is a GPU texture format rather than an ordinary picture.

How do I edit a game texture without breaking it?

Open it in paint.net or GIMP, edit, and export using the same compression format and with mipmaps enabled. Changing either is the usual reason a modified texture renders incorrectly.

File extensions

How to open a .dds file

DirectDraw Surface texture · Game texture

A .dds file is a game texture in a format designed for graphics cards. Paint.NET with the DDS plugin, GIMP or XnView MP all open one. Ordinary image viewers will not.

What a .dds file actually is

DDS stores textures the way a GPU wants them: block-compressed, and often with the whole mipmap chain of progressively smaller versions bundled in.

That is why it exists at all. The file can be sent to the graphics card almost unchanged, which is exactly what a game engine needs and exactly what a photo viewer does not understand.

Why it will not open

No operating system opens DDS, and most image software skips it because it is a graphics format rather than a picture format. Almost everyone asking is modding a game.

Renaming it to an extension you can open will not help: changing the extension does not convert the file, it only changes what Windows tries to open it with.

Step by step

Windows

01Install paint.net, which reads and writes DDS and is the usual tool for game texture work.
02GIMP opens DDS too and lets you control the compression and mipmaps on export.
03To just look at one, XnView MP and IrfanView display DDS quickly.
04When saving a modified texture, match the compression the game expects. Exporting with the wrong setting is the standard cause of a texture that loads but looks wrong.

macOS

01GIMP handles DDS on macOS.
02Preview does not open it.

What usually goes wrong

Mipmaps matter

Games rely on the smaller pre-generated versions inside the file for distant objects. Exporting without mipmaps produces a texture that looks fine up close and shimmers badly at a distance.

Programs that open .dds

Our pick, in order. Every one links to the publisher's official download URL and the SHA-256 hash of the installer. Once you have downloaded it, you can check the file against our index before you run it.

If you end up downloading one of these from somewhere other than the publisher, what you can and cannot verify about that is worth two minutes.

Common questions

What program opens a .dds file?: paint.net with its DDS support, GIMP, or XnView MP for viewing. Standard image viewers cannot read DDS because it is a GPU texture format rather than an ordinary picture.
How do I edit a game texture without breaking it?: Open it in paint.net or GIMP, edit, and export using the same compression format and with mipmaps enabled. Changing either is the usual reason a modified texture renders incorrectly.