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NVIDIA's AI Texture Tech Slashes VRAM by 85%
5 Apr
Summary
- AI compresses textures, reducing VRAM usage significantly.
- NTC tech demonstrated an 85% VRAM reduction in a demo.
- It avoids compression artifacts, potentially improving visual quality.
NVIDIA is reiterating the benefits of its Neural Texture Compression (NTC) technology. Introduced nearly three years ago and available via an SDK since early 2026, NTC employs machine learning to store textures more efficiently. Instead of saving every texel, it compresses textures into learned latent features that capture essential visual information. A small neural network on the GPU reconstructs these texels at runtime.
The system offers significant advantages. In a Tuscan Villa demo, NTC achieved an 85% reduction in VRAM usage, consuming 970MB compared to 6.5GB for traditional BCN compression. This is crucial for VRAM-heavy games. Furthermore, NTC can maintain texture quality without the artifacts often seen with BCN.
