BFN: about Crytek's approach

In my case, I have computed the best fist RGB value given a bias vector and, of course, the direction to fit. The BFN are stored in a cube map.

Crytek's approach is only storing the length of the best fitting vector for the requested normal direction. Furthermore, as explained in the notes (slide 94), 8-bits precision is sufficient if the best fit length is stored for the normal divided by maximum component.

As pointed out by Vince on my first post about BFN, there is some symmetry on each cube face. Indeed, the cubemap can be compressed into a single 2D texture (slide 94). This allows to save video memory at the cost of several ALU operations in the fragment shader (slide 95).

When using this final representation as a 2D texture, it is not possible to change the bias vector as I have proposed in my previous post. However, results seems to be good enough with Crytek's approach... (slides 42-43) Is it worth the cost to use a cubemap? My next step will be to compare the image quality with or without changing the bias vector in my deferred relief mapped renderer.