NLAC Suite TexSage

TexSage is a texture compression optimization tool for mobile platforms. It fully utilizes the ASTC format's variable block sizes - a powerful feature often left underutilized in current gamedev practices, and by batch-processing thousands of assets, it assigns optimal compression settings for each texture individually in a nearly 100% automated process at build time.

There is a known fact that texture content varies wildly in its compressibility: i.e. one texture may need a 4x4 block to look the same as the uncompressed original while another could use 12x12 without noticeable visual loss. The core principle is to connect this effect and general visual consistency across the entire project.

While the main goal is to reduce total texture storage and download size, achieving 10-20% package size reduction on average, and up to 30-40% in advanced best-case scenarios, there are also additional side effects:
1. In some cases there may be modest improvements in general performance such as loading times, streaming stutters, and frame rendering time due to reduced traffic across the entire pipeline from storage to gpu memory, as well as reduced memory and memory bandwidth usage.
2. In some cases there may be improvements in individual assets' render quality due to insufficient initial block size assignment.

Here is the one example. We took the Garden scene from Unity's URP sample project as a starting point. With globally enabled ASTC compression, the resulting apk file was 230 MB. After a simple, couple click TexSage run at quality 5, it became 207 MB, or 10% saving. All while the visual difference is barely noticeable on 1-to-1 flip comparisons (which you can see below) and indistinguishable on side-by-side comparisons on a large PC monitor. Remarkably, a couple of places actually improved in visual quality compared to the original. Out of the entire scene with multiple hundreds of textures, only two textures required a small adjustment to match the same "visually lossless" standard.

At quality 2, which is intended for regular smartphones and should be indistinguishable on side-by-side comparisons for the vast majority of players, the apk size is 189 MB, or almost 20% savings against original size. Both of these results were achieved without fine-tuning, using a simple two-click process with our Unity helper script. Additional gains could be achieved with advanced usage and tuning, especially with custom engines.

*All original assets shown from the Garden scene remain the exclusive property of Unity Technologies or its respective licensors. These assets are used solely for illustrative and demonstration purposes to display the capabilities of TexSage and not intended or authorized for redistribution. Flowerfield Software and TexSage are not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or sanctioned by Unity Technologies. Unity, the Unity logo, and other Unity trademarks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Unity Technologies or its affiliates in the U.S. and elsewhere.

As another example, we took our internal dataset that we use for codec stress-testing. This dataset consists of ~160 publicly available PBR textures, with a significant portion of it made from downsampling 4–16K sources to 2K resolution to increase fidelity, as open textures often have low effective texel density. A safe flat baseline for that dataset would be a 4x4 block size, as larger block sizes would cause noticeable visual degradation for a significant amount of textures, while at the same time being overkill for the rest of them. With that baseline, the total size comes to 732 MB, where TexSage at quality 5 produces 349 MB, or a 52% savings.

TexSage in engine-agnostic tool and works directly with texture assets at build time. For flexible integration, it can produce both the compression metadata to use in your own asset pipeline or compressed texture binary data for direct import. We also provide a Unity asset import/export helper script suitable for basic workflows or as a starting point for more complex integrations.