Official Wii U Thread!: Pokemon Rubmle U coming to Wii U

[DélioPT]

Viper1 said:

DélioPT said:
^ I think that was what Michael Ancel (Rayman) was talking about how they had big textures and then compressed them. Maybe Ubisoft already knew about this.

That's something different.

For years we've had to compress textures to save space and to make them transfer from the game medium to RAM faster.   Large textures tended to move too slowly so devs try to compress them as much as possible without losing quality S3TC's 6:1 texture compression has been the main one used for a long time.   But Ancel was saying that the Wii U was still able to move textures fast enough and process them fast enough that they could still use the large textures without needing to compress them first.

That's going to have the opposite effect because the large textures eat up a lot more space.  Using the 6:1 compression scheme for an example, you could compress 60 MB's of textures into 10 MB's.   So if you've allocated 100 MB's of RAM for textures, by not compressing them, you could eat up 600 MB's.   But it all depends on what texture compression schemes the Wii U has.

Thanks for the explanation! :)