NTC

Introduction This is an implementation of Neural Texture Compression (NTC) which is based on the NVIDIA research paper: Random-Access Neural Compression of Material Textures. I was at the point where I wanted to do texture compression for my custom engine, and after skimming through this research, I was impressed with the compression-quality results. So I went down the rabbit hole of machine learning. This post will serve as extended documentation of MetalNTC and I will try not to re-explain stuff that can be found in the original research, but rather cover details that haven’t been mentioned, to help give you an overview of the whole pipeline of this project. I will discuss positives/negatives and fail cases, as well as use cases of the NTC, since it for now can’t entirely replace traditional texture sampling. ...