NVIDIA Showcases AI-Powered Neural Texture Compression, Cutting VRAM Use by Up to 85%

NVIDIA showcased Neural Texture Compression (NTC) at GTC 2026, using a small neural network to decompress textures for game scenes in real time. As AAA games adopt higher-resolution assets, graphics-card VRAM capacity is increasingly becoming a bottleneck for visual quality and performance, making NTC a potentially important way to reduce hardware demands.

The latest demonstration showed that NVIDIA's NTC could compress high-resolution textures that originally occupied 6.5GB of VRAM to 970MB, reducing memory requirements by about 85%. The technology is designed to cut memory use while preserving visual quality. If adopted by game-engine makers and developers, it could ease new games' dependence on graphics cards with large amounts of VRAM.