New File Format Compresses Realistic 3D Textures on Any GPU

The Khronos Group announced the ratification of KTXTM 2.0, adding support for Basis Universal supercompression to this container format.

The team promises reliable, ubiquitous distribution of GPU textures. Basis Universal is a compression technology developed by Binomial that generates compact textures efficiently transcoded to a variety of GPU compressed texture formats at run-time.

Khronos has also made available the KHR_texture_basisu extension allowing glTF to contain KTX 2.0 textures. This results in "universally distributable glTF assets that reduce download size and use natively supported texture formats to reduce GPU memory size and boost rendering speed on diverse devices and platforms." What is more, they have also released open-source tools and transcoders, plus developer and artist guidelines.

3D assets typically use JPG or PNG compressed images to transport textures with reduced file sizes. These formats cannot be processed directly by GPUs so they are decompressed into full-size images in GPU memory, consuming memory space and bandwidth. GPU compressed texture formats allow developers to use compact in-memory textures, with optimized memory access for faster, more efficient rendering.

Basis Universal compression technology defines a 'universal' compressed texture format that can be efficiently transcoded at run-time into a natively supported GPU format on the target device. Learn more here

Join discussion

Comments 0

    You might also like

    We need your consent

    We use cookies on this website to make your browsing experience better. By using the site you agree to our use of cookies.Learn more