DDS
The DirectDraw Surface file format (.dds) was introduced with DirectX 7 to store uncompressed and compressed (DXTn) textures. The file format supports mipmaps, cube maps, and volume maps. The DDS file format is supported by DirectXTex, DirectXTK, legacy D3DX, and other DirectX tools. Starting with Direct3D 10, DDS files support texture arrays.
Note
The D3DX (D3DX 9, D3DX 10, and D3DX 11) utility library is deprecated for Windows 8 and is not supported for Windows Store apps. We recommended that you make use of DirectXTex, DirectXTK, or both.