NTC texture compression is undemanding to video memory and offers realistic quality. NVIDIA’s Blackwell graphics cards are specifically «tailored» for neural rendering.
On YouTube, a Compusemble enthusiast showed NTC in action on NVIDIA and Intel test systems This type of compression has not yet been announced in real games, so the YouTuber prepared demonstrations from Intel and NVIDIA. NTC promises a significant reduction in the size of textures not only in memory but also on disk, with better image quality. These are in the future allows developers to use a small neural network optimized for each material in the scene to unpack these textures.
To implement neural rendering, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and other involved companies have jointly created the DirectX Cooperative Vectors feature. It provides developers with advanced access to NVIDIA tensor cores or their equivalents.
A demonstration with a T-Rex model on an Intel system proves that textures decompressed with NTC are noticeably clearer compared to the commonly used block compression method. In addition, NTC textures are much more similar to the uncompressed original.
NVIDIA’s demo shows the advantages of NTC in the use of video memory. Uncompressed, the flight helmet textures take up 272 MB. Block compression reduces them to 98 MB, and NTC — to an incredible 11.37 MB. At the same time, on the NVIDIA RTX 5090, the average required frame time increases from 0.045 ms to 0.111 ms at 4K resolution, or a 2.5x increase. But this is still a tiny fraction of the total frame duration.
All in all, the above demonstrations show that neural texture compression has obvious advantages for developers and gamers. You should not choose between quality and memory usage if you can «kill two birds with one stone».
Source: Tom’s Hardware