New unity texture compression is awesome

AlecMoody

I did some testing on the new Unity "Crunched" texture compression option. The results are really fantastic and I thought others might want to see them. The game I am working on is system memory limited by our lack of texture streaming and support for 32bit machines so this is a huge help.

Lt_Commander

I noticed it as a new option, but I hadn't really looked at it. You should give an uncompressed version of the texture for reference as well.

Thanks for the heads up though, I might dig in and take a look myself.

Avvi

Detail looks OK, but the colors are wrong (slightly warmer)? Still, interesting.
Did you use it on the normal map also? They're sensitive to compression artifacts but at the same time they benefit from big resolutions.

AlecMoody

Yeah, I am using it on the normals. The tradeoff of 4 times the resolution for slightly more compression noise is totally worth it here.

Avvi

Great! thanks.

Frankie

I thought crunched was only in package size not video card memory?

edit:

found the documentation here http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-TextureImporter.html

Crunched Crunch is a lossy compression format on top of DXTR texture compression. Textures will be converted to DXT when uploading the GPU at runtime. Crunch compression helps achieving the lowest possible size footprint on disk and for downloads. Crunch textures can take very long to compress, but decompression at runtime is very fast.

in other words for users your game is quicker to download, looks worse, uses the same amound of ram/vram, takes longer to load (although apparently only slightly)

AlecMoody

Frankie: As I explained earlier, our game is system memory limited, not video memory limited, since it is open world and currently doesn't do texture streaming. The texture isn't converted to DXT until it enters video memory.

Frankie

Oh yeah I see, thanks for explaining again.