AMD has announced the development of a new texture compression method called NTBC (Neural Texture Block Compression), which uses artificial intelligence.
AMD NTBC technology solves the problem through compression using neural networks – it is partially compatible with texture compression algorithms used today (Block Compression, BC).
“It has been designed to be compatible with existing BC formats, namely BC1 and BC4, with a reduced footprint and can be used as a replacement for existing graphics processes. <..> We have shown that NTBC can achieve better compression ratios than standard BC for both approaches, while still generating textures of reasonable quality. However, there is a trade-off between quality and compression ratio for the aggressive and conservative approaches – the aggressive approach provides better compression ratios at the cost of a small quality penalty. Therefore, we leave it up to users to decide which approach, including standard BC, to use depending on their requirements. We believe that this flexibility is one of the advantages of NTBC due to its compatibility with existing BCs,” the creators of the technology said (PDF).
While NTBC promises a significant reduction in texture volume, its use may result in blurred detail or blocking artifacts due to the use of lower resolution meshes. Possible solutions include various encoding techniques such as texture focusing or local positional encoding. AMD researchers are also considering extending NTBC to BC6H and BC7 formats.
The main goal of NTBC is to reduce the total volume of game files, because lately there are often cases when a game weighs 150 GB or more. And this does not take into account the numerous DLCs. And, basically, the heaviest files are high-resolution textures.