March 29, 2026
Pixels on a diet, drama on blast
Hardware Image Compression
Apple’s one‑click texture squeeze sparks a format feud and budget‑phone angst
TLDR: Apple’s GPUs now offer a simple toggle that halves texture size, igniting fresh interest in hardware image compression. Commenters split between praising open, cross‑platform tools like Basis Universal and blasting new formats for favoring pricey flagships while older, bandwidth‑starved devices get left behind.
Apple quietly added an easy “lossy” switch in its graphics tech that cuts texture size in half, and the community immediately dove into drama mode. The dev crowd loves that it’s a one‑step opt‑in and works across tons of pixel types, but the comments aren’t celebrating so much as scoreboard‑watching. One camp is yelling, “Where’s Basis Universal?”—a popular, cross‑platform compressor—saying the post ignored a major player. Cue a spicy call‑out with a link to basis_universal and nods to KTX2 (a file container for textures).
The other hot take: irony overload. As one commenter puts it, the devices that need compression most—older, low‑power phones and tablets—can’t use the newest tricks. New hardware formats like ARM’s AFRC and ImgTec’s PVRIC4 land on fresh, pricey chips, where memory isn’t the bottleneck anyway. Translation for non‑nerds: compression saves space and speed, but the people with “potato phones” get left out. Meanwhile, Apple’s half‑size textures look decent in tests, but some purists grumble about quality and history lessons: it took years for older formats (like BC5, BC7) to become default, so will this be any different?
Jokes flew—“But can it run Crysis… textures?”—as the thread split between Team New Hardware Magic and Team Open, Works‑Everywhere Tools. The only thing everyone agrees on: compression drama is eternal—and very compressed.
Key Points
- •Hardware texture formats adopt slowly; ATI’s 3Dc (2004) became widespread only after Direct3D 10 standardized BC4/BC5 and D3D10-class GPUs became baseline.
- •BC6 and BC7 were co-designed by ATI and NVIDIA for inclusion in Direct3D 11 to reduce adoption delays.
- •Driver-based hardware compression is transparent and undocumented; three competing formats exist: ARM AFRC, ImgTec PVRIC4, and Apple’s lossy.
- •Apple’s lossy compression (A15/M2) offers 1:2 ratio and is easily enabled in Metal via MTLTextureDescriptor.compressionType = MTLTextureCompressionTypeLossy.
- •Quality tests: for R/RG, Metal Lossy (1:2) RMSE outperforms EAC_RG but trails BC4; RGBA results are not directly comparable to ASTC/BC7 due to different compression ratios.