The DirectDraw Surface container file format (uses the filename extension DDS), is a Microsoft format for storing data compressed with the proprietary S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) algorithm, which can be decompressed in hardware by GPUs. 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'.
History
This format was introduced with DirectX 7.0. In DirectX 8.0, support for volume textures was added. With Direct3D 10, the file format was extended to allow an array of textures to be included, as well as support for new Direct3D 10.x and 11 texture formats.
References
DirectDraw Surface Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA