DeathByDenim said: ↑ Yeah, it used to be png. But then Uber discovered that the DXT1 and DXT5 were way better for texturing purposes, since those formats are precompressed and GPUs just love 'em. Click to expand...

It's a format GPUs can decode quite easily on the fly, even though this is becoming a deprecated optimization.Ever since R9 285 / GTX970, GPUs from both major vendors now have hard wired compression algorithms (Delta Color Compression) embedded into their memory controllers, so the GPUs will actually prefer UNCOMPRESSED data, with the intention of compressing it themselves whenever it gets stored in RAM and relieving the regular shaders from that task. Saving both on memory bandwidth and used VRAM, with the benefit of not only compressing the source textures, but also all intermediate buffers and alike.So in the light of recent and upcoming GPU architectures, that optimization was in vain.