At CES 2025, Nvidia showcased a host of innovations, with some technologies promising more than others. One such innovation is the RTX Neural Texture Compression (RTXNTC) system. Unlike the spotlight-stealing RTX 5090, this toolkit quietly demonstrates impressive capabilities in game texture management.

How RTXNTC Works

Currently, game textures are compressed to save storage and bandwidth but often require extensive space. RTXNTC optimizes this by converting original textures into manageable arrays for a neural network, reducing the necessary visual data significantly.

Nvidia claims a memory footprint reduction from 272 MB uncompressed to just 11.37 MB using RTXNTC, providing performance gains alongside a drastic decrease in disk space requirement.

Performance Insights

While impressive in theory, RTXNTC incurs slight frame rate dips—about 15% at 1080p and 18% at 4K—but offers a remarkable 96% memory reduction. Handling actual rendering with older graphics cards may yield performance drops larger than those experienced with the RTX 4080 Super during testing.

Future implications

Though currently limited, the potential for RTXNTC and similar technologies could redefine texture management in gaming—raising questions on how competitors like AMD or Intel might counter this innovation, possibly paving the way for new standards in gaming graphics.

For details on testing the NTC demo with your own RTX card, find the beta version here.