AMD recently announced that it is working on a new AI-based texture compression method. The neural compression technology is called NTBC (Neural Texture Block Compression). It was announced at the EGSR (Eurographics Symposium on Rendering) conference, and now researchers Shin Fujieda and Takahiro Harada have published a paper describing the main features of the technology.
One of the problems of modern games is the large amount of memory they take up on the storage device. Some games may require up to 150 GB of storage. A significant part of this volume is taken up by high-resolution textures. But thanks to NTBC technology, it will be possible to reduce the volume of textures by 70%.
NTBC works with BC1 and BC4 textures using Multi-Level Perception (MLP) to simultaneously encode the block-compressed data of all textures in a single material while preserving the common format of the block-compressed textures. The technology does not require shader changes, which will simplify its implementation in the graphics pipeline. NTBC predicts the block-compressed data instead of loading it from disk; texel values are then decoded from the compressed data using the existing BC decompression method. Therefore, the method requires only a small computational cost at the texture loading stage of the graphics pipeline.
NTBC is not yet perfect. The creators admit that the technology sometimes creates blurry details or artifacts compared to the original texture. But the developers continue to work on improving the method and optimizing it. AMD also plans to expand NTBC to BC6H and BC7 textures.
It is too early to talk about practical implementation in games. But the technology is certainly promising.
Source:
Wccftech
