Texture Compression using PVRTC

Why use PVRTC?

In all legacy Rogue and first generation Volcanic cores, Imagination GPUs offers compatibility with Imaginations’ PVRTC (PowerVR Texture Compression), that offers great performance and quality.

The smallest RGB and RGBA format currently available on all PowerVR Graphics Cores is PVRTC 2bpp, and therefore it should be considered for every texture in an application. Larger formats such as PVRTC 4bpp should only be used if the image quality provided by a particular PVRTC 2bpp image does not have sufficient quality.

Performance improvement on PVRTC

The smaller memory footprint of PVRTC means less data is transferred from memory to the graphics core, allowing for major bandwidth savings. In situations where memory bandwidth is the limiting factor in an application’s performance, PVRTC can provide a significant boost. PVRTC also improves cache efficiency, because it takes less space to store the data in the cache. This can reduce the number of cache evictions and improve cache hit-rate.

Power consumption on PVRTC

Memory accesses are one of the primary causes of increased power consumption on mobile devices where battery life is of the utmost importance. The bandwidth savings and better cache performance resulting from the use of PVRTC both contribute to decreasing the quantity and magnitude of memory accesses. These in turn, reduce the power an application.