Stop Shipping PNGs in Your Games
4 days ago
- #texture-optimization
- #GPU-compression
- #game-development
- PNGs are suboptimal for shipping textures in games due to lack of features like pregenerated mipmaps, cubemaps, and premultiplied alpha.
- Texture formats like KTX2 and DDS are designed for GPU compatibility, offering direct upload to GPU and support for GPU compression formats like BCn.
- GPU compression formats improve storage, VRAM usage, and sampling performance, but require specific texture formats to utilize effectively.
- Exporting to KTX2 or DDS often requires custom tools, as mainstream image editors lack native support for these formats.
- Zex is an open-source tool for converting PNGs to KTX2, supporting BC7 compression and zlib supercompression, with features like mipmap generation.
- Automating texture conversion is recommended to save time and ensure consistency across game assets.