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.
Because the article is about hardware formats, not storage formats. GPU hardware formats are left compressed in GPU memory, the GPU decodes it on the fly. Basis universal must be decoded to a GPU hardware format (or to plain RGBA) before it can be used by the GPU.
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.
I feel like it's a pretty weird omission taht basis_universal isn't mentioned at all? Can also target Khronos's ktx2 too. https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal
Because the article is about hardware formats, not storage formats. GPU hardware formats are left compressed in GPU memory, the GPU decodes it on the fly. Basis universal must be decoded to a GPU hardware format (or to plain RGBA) before it can be used by the GPU.