NVIDIA's Neural Texture Compression cuts VRAM usage from 6.5GB down to 970MB

Neural Rendering is slowly taking shape in the world of gaming, where new AI technologies will accelerate visual fidelity and push traditional rendering to new heights on modern GPUs and next-gen console hardware. At the recent NVIDIA GTC 2026 event, a lengthy presentation titled 'Introduction to Neural Rendering' was conducted, covering a full range of new neural rendering technologies; however, the stand-out has to be Neural Texture Compression, which could be a game-changer on PC.

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As the name suggests, Neural Texture Compression (NTC) offers an alternative to texture streaming and rendering in games. Currently, most games use BCn Texture Compression, or "block compression," which breaks a texture or image into chunks or blocks that are compressed and then decompressed by the GPU. This allows GPUs to decompress parts of images or textures as needed.

Neural Texture Compression (NTC) is very different because it encodes the latent features and data of a texture into a compact format that the neural network on a GPU, i.e., Tensor Cores on a GeForce RTX card, can reconstruct. NVIDIA is clear that this isn't generative AI but deterministic, in which the AI essentially rebuilds and recreates the texture in real time.

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NTC allows for a much higher compression ratio than traditional BCn, leading to a significant reduction in the VRAM requirement to render a scene. One example NVIDIA showcased in its presentation was a Tuscan Villa Scene, where BCn textures resulted in 6.5GB of VRAM use. The same scene, now with NTC textures, sees VRAM usage drop to 970 MB - a massive 85% reduction. And to top it all off, NTC can deliver improved or comparable visual fidelity.

One added benefit of NTC is that the overall disk footprint or install size of games and patches also significantly reduces, as there's no need to store uncompressed or high-resolution texture data. In an era when increased game fidelity requires ever more VRAM, this could be a game-changer for PC gaming, especially for the many gamers with 6GB, 8GB, or even 12GB GPUs. And it's here right now, as Neural Texture Compression (NTC) is available for game developers to use, with the RTXNTC SDK available via GitHub.