NPOT Textures stored uncompressed in RAM?

Hi,

It seems that textures marked as npot are loaded in their full uncompressed size into ram?

  1. When i build an executeable (emtpy scene) it uses up 36mb of memory.

  2. When i add three 2048x1536 textures (marked gui npot compressed 1,5MB.) the same executeable will suddenly take up 84MB! of memory!! The difference (48MB) is exactly the size of 3 uncompressed 2048x2048 textrues (16,7MB * 3)

  3. When i change the the texture settings to advanced and change the textures to pot the memory usage decreases again to 40,5MB which is 36MB + 1,5MB per compressed texture.

Is this a Unity Bug and can I do something about it?

It is a bug that they don’t document what happens. Your format is respected, but textures are never actually in RAM as NPOT. They are expanded. So if you’re looking for efficiency, be aware of the lie, and only use POT.