Android 2D Textures Overrides

This page details the Texture OverridesPlatform-specific settings that allow you to set the resolution, file size with associated memory size requirements, pixel dimensions, and quality of your Textures for each target platform. More info
See in Glossary specific to Android. A description of the general Texture Overrides can be found here.

The information contained on this page assumes the reader has working knowledge of DXT and ETC Texture compressionA method of storing data that reduces the amount of storage space it requires. See Texture Compression, Animation Compression, Audio Compression, Build Compression.
See in Glossary, OpenGL ES and Android development.

Further information about Texture compression3D Graphics hardware requires Textures to be compressed in specialized formats which are optimized for fast Texture sampling. More info
See in Glossary and OpenGL ES can be found on the following Wikipedia pages:

• DXT Texture compression
• ETC (Ericsson Texture Compression)
• Lossy compression
• OpenGL ES

If a your app is installed on a device that does not support the Texture compression format you have used, Unity will decompress the Textures to RGBA 32 and store them in the device’s memory—along with the compressed Textures—when the app is running. This will lead to increased loading times and higher memory usage as Unity must decompress the Textures and store two versions of the Textures used (compressed and uncompressed).This can also have a large impact on renderingThe process of drawing graphics to the screen (or to a render texture). By default, the main camera in Unity renders its view to the screen. More info
See in Glossary performance, especially on older, slower devices.

Use ETC2 compression unless you are targeting specific hardware (like Nvidia Tegra). ETC2 supports Textures with and without an alpha channel and is supported by all OpenGL ES 3 devices. To avoid software decompression, set the minimum graphics API to OpenGL ES 3 in the Android Player settings by removing OpenGL ES 2 from the Graphics APIs list and setting the Minimum API Level to 18+.

To target OpenGL ES 2 and OpenGL ES 3 devices, you can create two different APKs by first building an APKThe Android Package format output by Unity. An APK is automatically deployed to your device when you select File > Build & Run. More info
See in Glossary targeting OpenGL ES 3, as shown above, and then building an APK targeting OpenGL ES 2 by removing OpenGL ES 3 and Vulkan from the Graphics APIs section of the Player settings. You can then publish both of these APKs to the Google Play Store. When a user downloads your app, the Google Play Store will automatically install the most relevant APK for their device. For more information about publishing multiple APK files, see Android Developer documentation on Publishing Multiple APKs and Google Play Store APK filtering.

When building an APK that targets OpenGL ES 2, you can use ETC1 texture compression.

The Texture compression format for OpenGL ES2-targeted APK can be ETC1. Unity can use ETC1 for Textures with Alpha, provided they are placed on an Atlas (by specifying the packing tag) and the build is for Android. You can opt in for this by setting the Compress using ETC1 checkbox for the Texture. Under the hood Unity splits the resulting atlas into two Textures, each without alpha and then combine them in the final parts of the render-pipeline.

If you absolutely want to store an alpha channel in a Texture, RGBA16 bit is the compression format supported by all hardware vendors.

• 2017–09–18 Page amended

• Updated feature in Unity 2017.1

• Crunch compression format updated in Unity 2017.3