NVIDIA Neural Texture Compression Cuts Gaming GPU VRAM by 85% — From 6.5GB to 970MB With Zero Quality Loss

Tom's Hardware·medium signal

NVIDIA demonstrated Neural Texture Compression (NTC) at GDC 2026 today, reducing VRAM for a test scene from 6.5GB (BCN compression) to 970MB — an 85% reduction with visual parity. NTC uses machine learning to compress textures into compact learned latent features. The SDK has been available since early 2026 but no game developer has shipped with it yet, leaving a major efficiency gain sitting on the shelf.