Two Tribes comes across Wii U hardware feature to reduce texture memory usage

On Twitter, Two Tribes told its followers that it “discovered a new hardware feature of the Wii U that shaves off 100 megabytes of texture memory”. The technique will be used in Toki Tori 2.

The studio later spoke about the advantages of the new feature. Two Tribes says “it means we spend less time loading and have more memory available when the game is running.”

http://nintendoeverything.com/102690/two-tribes-comes-across-wii-u-hardware-feature-to-reduce-texture-memory-usage/

No one had posted this, so I thought I would even though I don't know what it means...

It is too vague to know what it is ...

As a guess, I wouldn't be too surprised if it was something like using a vector-graphics based image format as textures which would result in the elimination of pixelation artifacts (improving quality) and a reduction in the amount of memory used by textures.

it sounds like they are discovering a lot of new features, that is the principal reason to why games released a year or two after the lauch of a new system are superior in all aspects.

It's likely they just figured out how to stream textures as needed rather than load them all into RAM first.