NVIDIA showcased its RTX Neural Texture Compression (NTC) technique back in 2023 , and once again in H1 2026, revealing that VRAM usage can be reduced by an impressive 85 percent . Now, the SDK that was available for developers on Windows 11 has made its way to the ARM64 platform because NVIDIA’s RTX Spark and several notebook families powered by this SoC are expected to arrive later this year.

Windows 11 ARM64 supporting RTX Neural Texture Compression was first spotted by Compusemble , with VideoCardz later reporting about the addition to the RTX Spark platform. To recap, NTC is designed not just to preserve high-quality visuals but also to drastically reduce VRAM usage. Given that modern AAA titles are making 8GB VRAM graphics processors less favorable, the technology will be embraced with open arms by gamers who cannot upgrade at this time due to the ongoing DRAM shortage .

We’ve previously discussed that this technique enables low-bitrate compression, unlocking two additional levels of detail, or 16× more texels with similar storage requirements as commonly used texture compression techniques. For a viewer to notice these visual differences, he or she will have to move in close to the object before it shows signs of texture degradation.

One implementation of the compression technique uses fused backpropagation, enabling practical per-material optimization at resolutions up to 8,192 × 8,192. The compressor could process a 9-channel, 4K material texture set in 1–15 minutes on an NVIDIA RTX 4090. While NVIDIA wants to streamline its advanced feature set to all platforms, it’ll only make a difference if developers can actually make use of the compression technique.

So far, the technology is limited to samples and demos. For RTX Spark, enabling NTC to reduce VRAM usage won’t be as necessary as it is with dedicated GPUs, because the unified memory architecture of the chipset allows it to be configured with up to 128GB of LPDDR5X RAM. Even if the 32GB memory configurations are more popular, it won’t necessitate the use of NTC.

However, the framerate boost for the RTX Spark will be highly welcome, even though the chipset has been demonstrated to be able to run titles like Alan Wake 2 and PRAGMATA fluidly . Alongside making the RTX Neural Texture Compression SDK available to developers, NVIDIA also released the first driver for Windows 11 ARM64 , signaling that the first laptops shipping with the SoC could arrive soon.

News Source: GitHub

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