Hardware Image Compression

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

cubefox wrote: post #7

Unfortunately the article mentions nowhere why a GPU would ever need to compress (rather than decompress) images. What's the application for that? In the beginning the article mentions formats for computer game textures, but I'm pretty sure those already ship compressed, and they only need to be decompressed by the client GPUs.

Post by castano-ludicon » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

e7h4nz wrote: post #6

mrec wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree given your "most" qualifier, but there's a case where every level of hardware would benefit: compression of textures generated at runtime, either via procgen or for e.g. environment maps. This is in a frustrating state at the moment. CPU compression is way too slow. Some people have demoed on-the-fly GPU compression using a compute shader, but annoyingly there is (or at least was at the time) no way…

Agreed. we hit some wired case on Adreno 530, ran into bizarre GPU instruction set issues with the compute shader compressor, that only manifested on Adreno 53x. Ended up having to add a device detection path, and fall back to CPU compression. which defeated much of the point.

Post by castano-ludicon » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 9:36 PM UTC

cubefox wrote: post #14

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone mentioned environment maps. Anything that's done with framebuffers or render-to-texture might benefit. e.g. Water reflections and refractions, metal surfaces reflecting the world, mirrors in bathrooms, panini distortion for high-FOV cameras, TV screens like the Breencasts in Half-Life 2

Why would they benefit from hardware compression?

Post by castano-ludicon » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 3:47 PM UTC

cubefox wrote: post #16

castano-ludicon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most immediate benefit is reduced memory use. Many devices are memory limited and with skyrocketing RAM prices this is becoming more problematic. Oversubscription drops performance catastrophically, but even without running into memory limits, compression reduces bandwidth which increases performance and lowers power use. This results in better experiences and longer battery life.

But in order to be compressed, don't we have to load the image into memory first, uncompressed? I don't quite see how this could result in reduced memory usage.