[lewispollard]

Hardware compressed texture formats introduce compression artifacts, which is fine for some art styles or PBR maps that don't need to be super accurate, but for some styles (such as pixel art or "clean" non-pixel styles, in both 2d and 3d) lossless compression is preferred, and yeah they're just decoded into bitmap data on the fly. Whether it wastes memory or not is subjective and dependent on use case. Yeah if you're pushing 4k PBR maps for terrain to the gpu using lossless formats for storage that's not smart, but you could argue that for many textures, using VRAM formats wastes disk/download space vs lossless (especially on mobile devices or webgl/wasm where space matters more). If disk space/download size isnt a concern then uncompressed vram formats can work for smaller textures. Though there is an initial decoding/upload cost to compressed lossless images, and they're not optimised well for streaming, at least with pixel art that's not a huge concern as textures tend to have small dimensions, though a spritesheet in a VRAM format can quickly baloon to ridiculous sizes for what is otherwise low resolution artwork. Of all the open formats that support lossless compression, are easy to link against, with wide platform support, webp is good, and smaller/faster than png for basically all images. Basis universal is a decent solution to the disk size problem of traditional VRAM formats, but it still isn't lossless (afaik?). Oodle is new to me, it looks good, appears to solve all of the above if the blurb is to be believed; it's a shame it's proprietary. I'd use it right away if it was FOSS.