Compressed texture using same memory as uncompressed in run time? Please clear up.

OK, I get it that compressed texture take up less file storage space and helps make a mobile game build smaller…

But when I’m looking at the Player Stats in the Editor, it shows the exact same texture count and amount of memory used when I used a compress texture atlas vs a non-compressed texture atlas.

Could this be right?

Thanks,
Manny

Yes. Think about how zipped folders work. Compressed images are pretty much the same. Have to uncompress the entire thing in order to use them. Compression is only for “dead” file size.

If you use a texture compression format supported by your mobile hardware, and your texture dimensions are powers of two on each side, the size reported by Unity in the texture importer inspector preview window should be about how much memory it will use on your hardware, since it will not need to decompress the whole image at the same time to use it.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/will-compressed-texture-be-uncompressed-into-memory.274634/

http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/pvrtc-the-most-efficient-texture-compression-standard-for-the-mobile-graphics-world