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AMD’s Neural Texture Block Compression (NTBC) is a published research technology that reported up to about 70% lower storage requirements for evaluated texture data. That does not mean a 150GB game will automatically become 45GB. Textures are only one part of a modern game installation, and NTBC has not been verified as a broadly available consumer feature or commercial-game standard.
NTBC is designed to encode textures into block-compressed formats while preserving compatibility with existing shader paths. If developers eventually integrate it into production pipelines, it could reduce installation and possibly download requirements—but the real-world savings will vary substantially by game.
What is AMD NTBC?
NTBC stands for Neural Texture Block Compression. AMD researchers Shin Fujieda and Takahiro Harada described the technology in a paper published on June 27, 2024: Neural Texture Block Compression.
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Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallIt uses a neural network to learn a mapping from uncompressed textures to conventional block-compressed texture representations. The objective is to use the available texture representation more efficiently while keeping the output compatible with the existing rendering approach.
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NTBC is a texture-compression method—not a general-purpose utility that compresses every file in a game. It also is not generative AI: it does not invent new artwork or replace a game’s assets.
Why modern games need better texture compression
Large game installations often contain extensive libraries of high-resolution assets. A single material may include several texture maps for color, roughness, metallic properties, normals, transparency, and other surface details. Games may also ship multiple mipmap levels, 4K or 8K assets, duplicate platform data, and optional high-resolution packs.
Open-world games can include thousands of textures for environments, characters, vehicles, buildings, foliage, and objects. Existing block-compression formats are mature and widely supported, but their fixed-rate designs limit how efficiently different kinds of textures can be represented.
Textures are not always the largest part of an installation. Audio, video, geometry, localization files, shaders, patches, and duplicated assets can also consume substantial space. That is why a reduction in texture storage cannot be converted directly into an equivalent reduction in total game size.
How NTBC works
The basic process can be represented like this:
Uncompressed texture
↓
NTBC neural encoder
↓
Block-compressed texture data
↓
Existing game texture-loading and shader pathTraditional texture compression uses established algorithms and fixed block formats. NTBC applies a trained neural model during encoding to find a more efficient representation for the source image at a chosen quality target.
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The paper’s compatibility goal is important: NTBC is designed to work without requiring shader changes. However, that does not mean developers can enable it with a switch. They would still need to encode assets, integrate the output into their build pipeline, validate visual quality, test loading and streaming, support target hardware, and provide fallbacks where necessary.
What does “up to 70% smaller” really mean?
The accurate claim is up to about 70% lower storage footprint for the evaluated texture data. “Up to” describes a maximum reported result, not an average guarantee for every texture or game.
For example, if a relevant texture set occupies 100GB, a 70% reduction would leave approximately 30GB of texture data. But the final game-size reduction depends on how much of the complete installation consists of those textures.
| Example | Original size | After a 70% texture reduction |
|---|---|---|
| Texture data only | 100GB | About 30GB |
| Textures account for half of a 150GB game | 75GB of textures plus 75GB of other files | About 97.5GB total, before packaging effects |
In the second example, the game becomes roughly 35% smaller—not 70% smaller—because only half of the installation was texture data.
Some coverage has used a 150GB Call of Duty installation becoming 45GB as an illustration. That is a secondary-source extrapolation, not a measured retail-game deployment confirmed by AMD. It should not be treated as a prediction for Call of Duty or any other existing game.
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Potential benefits and trade-offs
Lower installation and download requirements
If a developer replaces conventional texture assets with more compact NTBC representations, the game could occupy less space on an SSD or hard drive. A smaller asset package could also reduce downloads, although the result would depend on the publisher’s packaging and patching system.
Possible streaming benefits
Smaller texture data may reduce the amount of information that must be read from storage during loading or streaming. That could be useful in open-world games, but it does not guarantee faster loading, smoother traversal, or higher frame rates.
Loading-time computation
The NTBC paper reports preservation of real-time performance and modest computational overhead during the texture-loading phase. In practice, the balance depends on whether a game is limited by storage bandwidth, CPU time, GPU processing, memory bandwidth, or streaming latency.
Compression can save storage and reduce I/O while adding work during loading. Developers would need to measure the complete pipeline rather than assume that a smaller file is automatically faster.
Visual quality
“Reasonable quality” is not a universal guarantee. Compression artifacts can be more visible in gradients, normal maps, alpha-heavy textures, foliage, decals, reflective surfaces, and other difficult material types. A production implementation would need quality thresholds and asset-by-asset validation.
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Does NTBC reduce VRAM usage?
Not automatically. The main reported result concerns texture storage footprint, not a universal equivalent reduction in runtime VRAM usage.
| Resource | What it means | What NTBC establishes |
|---|---|---|
| Installation storage | Space occupied on an SSD or hard drive | This is the primary reported target |
| Download size | Data transferred from a store or server | Could benefit if packaging uses the compact assets |
| System RAM | Data staged during loading | Depends on the engine and loading path |
| VRAM | Texture data resident on the GPU | No universal proportional reduction is established |
| Streaming cache | Assets loaded and evicted during play | Depends on residency and cache policies |
Runtime memory use depends on the format consumed by the graphics API, mip level, texture residency policy, cache behavior, and engine implementation. Smaller on-disk files should not be advertised as guaranteed VRAM savings.
Can gamers use AMD NTBC today?
Practical answer: No verified universal consumer switch currently enables NTBC for installed games.
There is no verified NTBC setting in AMD Software: Adrenalin, Steam, the Epic Games Store, Xbox PC, or a standard Windows game configuration. Existing installations should not be assumed to use NTBC unless a developer or publisher explicitly confirms it.
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NTBC versus other AMD compression technologies
- BCn texture compression: Mature, fixed-rate block-compression formats widely used in graphics pipelines.
- Brotli-G: A packaging and digital-asset compression technology listed alongside AMD’s Compressonator workflows. It is separate from NTBC.
- AMD Dense Geometry Format: A separate technology for geometry compression, not texture compression. AMD discusses it in its DGF overview.
- Nvidia Neural Texture Compression: A separate research direction with its own formats, hardware path, quality characteristics, and runtime requirements. It should not be treated as equivalent to AMD NTBC.
Hardware and platform support remain unverified
The available evidence does not establish a definitive consumer GPU-generation requirement. It does not prove that NTBC requires a particular Radeon architecture, dedicated AI hardware, RDNA 4, or a future AMD GPU.
Nor does the evidence establish identical support across Radeon, GeForce, Intel, console, Linux, or handheld hardware. A production release would need a documented API, supported hardware matrix, drivers, tools, and fallback behavior.
What gamers can do about large installations now
NTBC is not currently a user-side compression tool, so practical storage reductions must come from the game and launcher’s existing options:
- Remove optional high-resolution texture packs.
- Uninstall unused language packs where the launcher supports it.
- Use built-in storage-management or selective-installation controls.
- Move less frequently played games to a secondary SSD.
- Choose a larger SSD if capacity—not loading performance—is the actual limitation.
- Avoid third-party tools that modify installed game files unless the publisher and launcher explicitly support that workflow.
What developers would need to test
- Visual quality: Compare gradients, normal maps, transparency, foliage, decals, and reflective materials.
- Encoding pipeline: Integrate asset conversion, mipmap handling, build automation, and debugging tools.
- Loading cost: Profile initial loading, level transitions, and texture streaming on target hardware.
- Streaming behavior: Test traversal stutter, cache misses, seek patterns, and open-world asset pressure.
- Platform coverage: Validate Windows, consoles, handhelds, Linux or Steam Deck targets, and non-AMD GPUs where applicable.
- Patch behavior: Measure whether the packaging system delivers genuinely smaller updates or rewrites entire archives.
- Fallbacks: Retain conventional formats for unsupported platforms or assets that fail quality targets.
The phrase “no shader changes” can simplify one part of adoption, but it does not remove the engineering, QA, tooling, licensing, and distribution decisions required for a commercial game.
Bottom line
AMD NTBC is promising research, not a confirmed feature that gamers can activate today. The published work reports up to about 70% lower storage for tested texture data, with reasonable quality, shader-path compatibility as a goal, and modest loading-time computational overhead.
Whether that becomes a 10%, 30%, or much larger reduction in a complete game depends on the game’s asset mix, packaging, quality settings, platform support, and developer implementation. Until AMD or game developers publish a production SDK, hardware matrix, and measured commercial-game results, “70% smaller games” remains an overstated interpretation.
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