Do Use Texture Compression

Reduce the memory footprint and bandwidth cost of the texture assets.

In some instances, it is worth considering the balance between texture size and texture compression. It may be possible to use a larger texture and a low-bitrate compression scheme and achieve a better balance of bandwidth savings and acceptable image quality.

Texture compression, not to be confused with image file compression, minimises the runtime memory footprint of textures. This provides several performance benefits, but primarily reduces the amount of system memory bandwidth consumed sending data to the graphics core.

PVRTC and PVRTCII are PowerVR specific compression technologies and will achieve best performance on the hardware, consuming as little as 2 bits per pixel. These textures are also very texture cache efficient as the lower pixel size allows more pixels to fit in the limited amount of cache memory available to the texture units.

Depending on the PowerVR generation and graphics API targeted, additional compressed texture formats may be supported, such as ASTC.