Intel and Microsoft showcase AI-powered texture compression at GDC 2025

Texture compression has been used in PC gaming for decades, ever since the first texture was applied to a basic 3D character model or environment. In 2025, with the rise of 4K gaming across the PC and console space, these high-resolution textures often contain several layers. The dinosaur example below shows eight 4096 x 4096 PBR textures with 13 channels of surface detail covering roughness, ambient occlusion, and other properties.

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T-Rex asset and its associated textures, image credit: Intel.

Add this all up, and you've got 200 million texture values per texture that would need to be stored in memory (the VRAM on a GPU) for the single in-game asset. Regarding gaming in super-high resolution with ultra settings in 2025, this is one of the reasons why the general rule of thumb is - the more VRAM, the better. Even so, new AI-powered methods of texture compression will significantly improve performance.

At GDC 2025, Intel's Anis Benyoub is joining Microsoft on stage as it showcases 'Cooperative Vectors on DirectX,' a new feature that will lead to a 10X improvement in inference performance for Neural Block Texture Compression on Intel Arc GPUs. Joe Rozek from AMD and Alexey Panteleev from NVIDIA will also be there to discuss how Cooperative Vectors will be used with Radeon and GeForce RTX hardware.

As described by Intel, "Cooperative Vectors allow the multiplication of matrices with arbitrarily sized vectors to be run on any shader stage. Therefore, they can be used not only for training AI models, e.g., using compute shaders, but also for real-time inference, specifically per-pixel inference, to accelerate the execution of neural rendering techniques on hardware with AI acceleration." Translation, Cooperative Vectors allow AI models to run during all stages of the rendering process with direct access to game and on-screen data.

Intel's Arc hardware includes powerful XMX units for AI workloads; Cooperative Vectors will help pave the way for neural rendering and neural shaders to become an integral part of game development and how games run on modern GPUs. Intel isn't alone in supporting Neural Block Texture Compression as a way to reduce texture sizes without losing quality; AMD is also all in on the tech thanks to RDNA 4's beefy AI upgrade, while NVIDIA is also deeply invested in a range of RTX Neural Shaders aimed at improving performance and reducing the VRAM footprint of modern games.