The Neural Texture Block Compression system, which harnesses the power of artificial intelligence, will be showcased at the forthcoming Eurographics Symposium on Rendering in London this July.
In a move mirroring its competitor Nvidia, AMD strongly emphasises AI, even rebranding its laptop gaming CPUs under the AMD AI moniker.
Despite this, AMD acknowledges the strides it must make to match Nvidia's prowess in this arena. Its latest GPUs, including the lauded Radeon RX 7800 XT, boast formidable gaming capabilities, yet its AI matrix cores remain underused in current gaming applications.
AMD's recent proclamation details the development of an innovative texture compression method using neural networks.
A statement from the AMD GPUOpen platform highlighted the universal disdain for lengthy game downloads, asserting that their novel AI-driven compression technique will substantially reduce data sizes.
AMD claims game developers will seamlessly integrate this new system, citing "unchanged runtime execution" as a facilitator for effortless incorporation into games.
Textures significantly contribute to most game installation files, especially with the escalating demand for higher resolution and detail.
AMD's compression system could benefit textures. If the system can maintain sufficient detail while occupying less space than current textures, it could shrink the size of game installations.
This has happened before. Nvidia had previously explored a similar concept. In August 2023, Nvidia presented a research paper at Siggraph titled "Random-Access Neural Compression of Material Textures," which also described an AI-based method for compressing textures, yielding impressive visual results.
The study demonstrated how a massive uncompressed texture of 4,096 x 4,096 pixels, occupying 256MB, could be reduced to a mere 5.3MB when scaled down to 1,024 x 1,024 pixels using block compression techniques.
However, Nvidia's AI compression system maintained the original texture size with significantly more detail, all within a compact 3.8MB.
As AMD gears to unveil its Neural Texture Block Compression system, the industry eagerly anticipates whether it will adopt a methodology akin to Nvidia's.
This comes at a busy time for AMD, with the expected release of the first Zen 5 CPUs in July 2024.