Tom's Hardware Benchmarks Nvidia RTX Neural Texture Compression and Finds Huge VRAM Savings With Tradeoffs

Nvidia's RTX Neural Texture Compression is moving from flashy demo talk into the kind of evidence PC players can actually weigh. Tom's Hardware published new benchmarks on April 11, 2026 using Nvidia's sample and multiple GPUs, and the result is fairly clear: the memory savings are real, but the way developers deploy the technology matters just as much as the headline percentage.

What the benchmark found

The most aggressive mode, Inference on Sample, delivered the big win that has made NTC interesting in the first place. In Tom's Hardware's test scene, texture memory dropped by about 85% compared with the block-compressed working set. The article also says image quality stayed very close to the reference assets, which is exactly why NTC is being discussed as a practical rendering feature instead of being dismissed as another vague AI marketing term.

Where the tradeoff appears

The catch is performance cost. Inference on Sample decodes textures on the fly, and Tom's Hardware says that cost shows up across tested GPUs. On the RTX 4060 Laptop GPU at 1080p, the article measured roughly 0.70 to 0.85 milliseconds of added cost depending on scenario. That may be acceptable when VRAM is the limiting factor, but it is not a free win. The same testing also notes that Stochastic Texture Filtering can introduce visible noise without anti-aliasing, so DLSS or at least TAA becomes important if developers want the mode to look clean.

The safer deployment path

Nvidia's less dramatic mode, Inference on Load, looks much easier to ship broadly. It transcodes NTC textures into BCn during load, which keeps performance roughly aligned with conventional block-compressed textures. The downside is that it does not shrink runtime VRAM usage in the same way. Instead, it mainly helps with disk footprint and data movement.

Why PC gaming should care

That split is what makes NTC meaningful for real games. Developers do not have to treat it as all-or-nothing. High-end hardware can chase the biggest VRAM savings, while a wider range of systems may benefit from safer load-time workflows that reduce install size without adding extra frame-time pressure. If the tooling matures and cross-vendor support holds, NTC could become one of the first AI-adjacent graphics features judged less by hype and more by whether it solves an old PC gaming problem: too many beautiful textures for too little memory.