Nvidia's RTX Neural Texture Compression (NTC) has finally been benchmarked, demonstrating the technology's capabilities in an actual 3D workload. Compusemble benchmarked Nvidia's new memory compression tech on an RTX 4090 at 1440p and 4K resolution, revealing a whopping 96% reduction in memory texture size with NTC compared to conventional texture compression techniques. You can see the results in the video below.
Compusemble tested NTC in two modes: "NTC transcoded to BCn" and "Inference on Sample." The former transcodes textures to BCn on load, while the latter only decompresses the individual texels needed to render a specific view, further reducing texture memory size.
At 1440p with DLSS upscaling enabled, the "NTC transcoded to BCn" mode reduced the test application's texture memory footprint by 64%, from 272MB to 98MB. However, the "NTC inference on sample" mode decreased the texture size significantly to just 11.37MB. This represents a 95.8% reduction in memory utilization compared to non-neural compression, and an 88% reduction compared to the previous neural compression mode.
Compusemble's benchmarks revealed that performance takes a minor hit when RTX Neural Texture Compression is enabled. However, the benchmarker ran this beta software on the prior-gen RTX 4090, not the current-gen RTX 5090, so it is possible that these performance reductions could shrink with the newer architecture.
"NTC transcoded to BCn" mode showed a negligible reduction in average FPS compared to NTC off, though 1% FPS lows were noticeably better than regular texture compression with NTC disabled. "NTC inference on sample" mode took the biggest hit, going from the mid-1,600 FPS range to the mid-1,500 FPS range. 1% lows significantly dropped into the 840 FPS range.
Memory capacity reduction is the same at 1440p with TAA anti-aliasing instead of DLSS upscaling, but the GPU's performance behavior differs. All three modes ran significantly faster than DLSS, operating at almost 2000 FPS. 1% lows in the "NTC inference on sample" mode ran in the mid 1,300 FPS range, a big leap from 840 FPS.
Unsurprisingly, upping the resolution to 4K drops performance significantly. DLSS upscaling enabled shows an average FPS in the 1,100 FPS range in the "NTC transcoded to BCn" mode and just under 1,000 FPS average in the "NTC inference on sample" mode. 1% lows for both modes were in the 500 FPS range. Disabling DLSS in favor of native resolution with TAA anti-aliasing shows an average FPS boost into the 1,700 FPS range with the "NTC transcoded to BCn" mode and an average FPS in the 1,500 range with the "NTC inference on sample" mode. 1% lows for the former NTC mode were just under 1,100 FPS, while the latter mode's 1% lows were just under 800 FPS.
Finally, Compusemble tested cooperative vectors with the "NTC inference on sample" mode at 4K resolution with TAA. Cooperative vectors enabled resulted in an average frame rate in the 1,500 range, disabled average FPS plummets to just under 650 FPS. 1% lows similarly were just under 750 FPS, with cooperative vectors turned on; disabled 1% lows were just above 400 FPS, respectively.
Takeaways
Compusemble's RTX NTC benchmarks reveal that Nvidia's neural compression technology can reduce a colossal amount of a 3D application's memory texture footprint but at the cost of performance, especially in the "inference on sample" mode.
The DLSS vs native resolution performance is the most interesting aspect. The significant frame rate increase at native resolution shows that the tensor cores used to process RTX NTC are being taxed very hard, probably to the point where DLSS upscaling performance is hindered, enough to potentially bottleneck the shader cores. If this didn't, we should see the DLSS mode operating at a higher frame rate than the native 4K TAA benchmarks.
RTX Neural Texture Compression has been in development for at least a few years. The new technology uses the tensor cores in modern Nvidia GPUs to compress 3D applications and video game textures instead of traditional Block Truncation Coding. RTX NTC represents the first massive upgrade in texture compression technology since the 1990s, allowing for up to four times higher-resolution textures than GPUs are capable of running today.
The technology is in beta, and there's no release date. Interestingly, the minimum requirements for NTC appear to be surprisingly low. Nvidia's GitHub page for RTX NTC confirms that the minimum GPU requirement is an RTX 20-series GPU. Still, the tech has also been validated to work on GTX 10 series GPUs, AMD Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs, and Arc A-series GPUs, suggesting we could see the technology go mainstream on non-RTX GPUs and even consoles.
