Hardware Image Compression

by luu on 3/28/2026, 6:58:13 PM

https://www.ludicon.com/castano/blog/2026/03/hardware-image-compression/

Comments

by: e7h4nz

The irony of hardware image compression is that the devices that need it most are typically older, bandwidth-constrained SoCs. However, these are precisely the devices that do not support modern formats.Technologies like ARM AFRC and PVRIC4 can only be used on modern flagship devices. Since flagship memory bandwidth isn't particularly strained to begin with, we end up spending a massive amount of effort on optimizations that only benefit a fraction of users. In most cases, teams are simply unwilling to pay that development cost.The driver behavior of PVRIC4 perfectly encapsulates the current state of mobile GPU development: 1. The API promises support for flexible compression ratios. 2. The driver silently ignores your request and defaults to 1:2 regardless. 3. You only discover this because a PowerVR developer quietly confirmed it in a random comment section.This is a microcosm of the "texture compression hell" we face. Beyond the mess of format fragmentation, even the driver layer is now fragmented. You can't trust the hardware, and you can't trust the software.While the test results for ARM AFRC are genuinely impressive—it's not easy to outperform a software encoder in terms of quality—it remains problematic. As long as you cannot guarantee consistent behavior for a single codebase across different vendors, real-time CPU and GPU encoders remain the only pragmatic choice.For now, hardware compression encoders are just "nice-to-haves" rather than reliable infrastructure. I am curious if anyone has used AFRC in a production environment? If so, I’d love to know how your fallback strategy was designed.

3/30/2026, 6:06:20 AM

by: canpan

Wasn't there also patent issues with early texture compression schemes? DXT1? Adding a delay of 20 or so years.

3/30/2026, 11:00:32 AM

by: cubefox

Unfortunately the article mentions nowhere why a GPU would ever need to compress (rather than decompress) images. What's the application for that? In the beginning the article mentions formats for computer game textures, but I'm pretty sure those already ship compressed, and they only need to be decompressed by the client GPUs.

3/30/2026, 10:59:45 AM

by: jauntywundrkind

I feel like it's a pretty weird omission taht basis_universal isn't mentioned at all? Can also target Khronos's ktx2 too. <a href="https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal</a>

3/29/2026, 5:47:21 AM