Intel introduces its own Neural Compression technology with a fallback mode that works on GPUs without dedicated AI cores — early performance is on the level of Nvidia NTC

Intel is developing its own version of neural compression technology, which will reduce the footprint of video game textures in VRAM and/or storage, similar to Nvidia’s NTC. Intel’s solution can achieve a 9x compression ratio in its quality mode and an 18x compression ratio in its more aggressive setting. The GPU maker also announced it will have two versions of the tech for different hardware, similar to XeSS. One will be tuned for its XMX engine while the other will be designed to run on traditional CPU and GPU cores at the expense of performance.

Intel is using BC1 texture compression and linear algebra for the XMX-accelerated portion of its neural texture compression technology. BC1 takes advantage of a “feature pyramid” that compresses four BC1 textures with MIP-chains. Compared to traditional compression, Intel’s neural compression uses weights to compress textures with minimal loss to image quality. An encoder is responsible for encoding the textures, and a decoder is responsible for the decompression stage.

By contrast, the fallback mode is using an FMA or fused multiply and add implementation that runs slower than its linear algebra counterpart.

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