Intel introduces its own Neural Compression technology with a fallback mode that works on GPUs without dedicated AI cores — early performance is on the level of Nvidia NTC

Intel is developing neural compression to shrink game textures in VRAM or storage, similar to Nvidia's NTC.

Two compression modes exist: quality mode achieves 9×, and an aggressive mode achieves 18×.

Two implementations will be offered: an XMX-accelerated version using BC1 and a feature pyramid, and a fallback that runs on CPU/GPU cores using FMA with reduced performance.

The system uses learned weights and an encoder/decoder pair to compress textures with minimal image-quality loss.

Developers can deploy compression server-side, stream during load or gameplay, or load on the fly to save install time, disk space, or VRAM; Variant A compresses two 4K 64MB textures to 10.7 MB and two others to 2.7 MB after halving resolution.