NVIDIA's AI Texture Compression is what PC gaming needs right now

The current DRAM crisis is affecting all aspects of the PC industry, and right now, the rising cost of components like DDR5 memory is making the prospect of building a new rig or upgrading out of the question for many. And with GPU prices expected to rise in the coming months, there's a sense that PC gamers are going to have to make do with what they've got or can pick up for a reasonable price.

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Yesterday, we reported on a rumor that NVIDIA would focus on delivering more 8GB GPUs, such as the GeForce RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti, to the market this year. The big concern here is that 8GB will remain a bottleneck for gaming with higher graphics settings; however, the arrival of RTX Neural Texture Compression could be the relief the VRAM-constrained PC gaming market needs.

Part of NVIDIA's RTX Neural Shaders SDK for developers, the RTX Neural Texture Compression SDK leverages AI to "significantly" compress textures while maintaining image quality. And the latest 0.9 update from NVIDIA has sped up encoding by a factor of 6X, while reducing latency and saving up to 7X the memory footprint allocated for high-resolution textures.

As in-game textures already use traditional block compression methods, it's best to think about RTX Neural Texture Compression as an impressive alternative to existing technology, ala DLSS.

NVIDIA has confirmed that the latest version of RTX Neural Texture Compression is now available to all game developers via the NVIDIA RTX Kit. The impact of an upcoming PC game using this technology could be massive for GeForce RTX gamers, as textures can be reduced in size by up to 90%, freeing up significant VRAM on cards like the aforementioned GeForce RTX 5060. It's the difference between 8GB of VRAM being a bottleneck for hitting a certain level of performance, and 8GB of VRAM being more than enough to run games without worrying about running out of memory.

And as a bonus, the installation sizes of games could also be significantly reduced, which makes RTX Neural Texture Compression the sort of technology we'd like to see sooner rather than later.