By Alessio Palumbo
Publication Date: 2026-04-04 20:00:00
During a GTC 2026 session titled “Introduction to Neural Rendering,” NVIDIA showcased its Neural Texture Compression (NTC) technique once again.
Neural Texture Compression was showcased for the first time nearly three years ago and has been available via an SDK since early 2026, but so far, no game developers have used it. Perhaps that is why NVIDIA has once again taken the chance to explain its potential benefits.
Senior DevTech Engineer Alexey Bekin described Neural Texture Compression as a machine learning approach for storing textures more efficiently. Instead of storing every texel directly, NTC compresses the texture into compact learned latent features that capture its essential visual information. At runtime, a small neural network running on the GPU reconstructs texel values from these features, computing them on demand instead of loading large textures from memory. Critically, NTC is not generative; it’s deterministic. That means it reconstructs the same texture each and every time.
The system has two components. The latent texture is a dramatically smaller representation of the original asset, where each texel stores a feature vector describing material properties rather than a final color. To ensure fine detail is recoverable, positional encoding is applied to the UV coordinates before they reach the decoder, thus injecting high-frequency spatial information that helps the network accurately reconstruct sharp details and…
