Recommended, default, and supported texture formats, by platform

This page contains the following information:

• Terminology
• Recommended texture formats, by platform
• Desktop
• iOS and tvOS
• Android
• Default texture formats, by platform
• Texture compression formats, by quality
• Supported texture formats, by platform

This page doesn’t contain information about console platforms. For information about console platforms, see the platform-specific documentation.

For an overview of texture formats, see Texture formats. For information about texture import settings and how to set per-texture platform-specific overrides, see Texture import settings. Some texture import settings can also be overridden globally in Build Settings, mostly to speed up iteration time during development.

Terminology

This page uses the following terminology:

• Bits per pixelThe smallest unit in a computer image. Pixel size depends on your screen resolution. Pixel lighting is calculated at every screen pixel. More info
  See in Glossary (bpp) is the amount of storage required for a single texture pixel. Textures with a lower bpp value have a smaller size on disk and in memory. A lower bpp value also means that the GPU can store more pixels in its cache, which results in faster texture access.
• LDR (Low Dynamic Range) refers to most typical images where colors are conceptually between 0.0 (black) and 1.0 (white) values. The majority of image files (such as PNG and JPG) have low dynamic range.
• HDRhigh dynamic range
  See in Glossary (High Dynamic Range) refers to special image and texture formats where colors can have a higher range than 0 through 1. Image file formats like .exr or .hdr are often used for HDR image data. At runtime and on the GPU, there are several HDR formats, trading off accuracy, range and memory usage.
• RGB is a color model in which red, green and blue combine to reproduce an array of colors.
• RGBA is a version of RGB with an alpha channel, which supports blending and opacity alteration.
• Variable bit rate (VBR) means that bits per pixel is not a fixed value, and depends on the actual content instead. VBR only applies to Crunch compression, and only texture size on disk. The size in memory is the same as when using the underlying texture format (for example, RGB Compressed DXT1 for RGB Crunched DXT1).

Recommended texture formats, by platform

Desktop

For devices with DirectX 11 or better class GPUs, where support for BC7 and BC6H formats is guaranteed to be available, the recommended choice of compression formats is: RGB textures - DXT1 at four bits/pixel. RGBA textures - BC7 (higher quality, slower to compress) or DXT5 (faster to compress), both at eight bits/pixel. HDR textures - BC6H at eight bits/pixel. If you need to support DirectX 10 class GPUs on PC (NVIDIA GPUs before 2010, AMD before 2009, Intel before 2012), then DXT5 instead of BC7 would be preferred, since these GPUs do not support BC7 nor BC6H.

See the Supported texture formats reference table for detailed information about all supported formats.

iOS and tvOS

For Apple devices that use the A8 chip (2014) or above, ATSC is the recommended texture format for RGB and RGBA textures. This format allows you to choose between texture quality and size on a granular level: all the way from eight bits/pixel (4x4 block size) down to 0.89 bits/pixel (12x12 block size). If support for older devices is needed, or you want additional Crunch compression, then Apple devices support ETC/ETC2 formats starting with A7 chip (2013). For even older devices, PVRTC is the format to use. On iOS you can configure the default texture format in the Player SettingsSettings that let you set various player-specific options for the final game built by Unity. More info
See in Glossary. PVRTC gives you the broadest possible compatibility. ASTC is preferred, but is not supported on A7 devices (the very first Metal-enabled devices) and will be unpacked at runtime.

See the Supported texture formats reference table for detailed information about all supported formats.

Android

Texture format support on Android is complicated. You might need to build several application versions with different sub-targets.

You can select the default format in Player Settings. Your options are ASTC, ETC2 and ETC (ETC1 for RGB, ETC2 for RGBA). See Texture compression settings for more details on how the different settings interact.

For LDR RGB and RGBA textures, most modern Android GPUs that support OpenGL ES 3.1 or Vulkan also support ASTC format, including: Qualcomm GPUs since Adreno 4xx / Snapdragon 415 (2015), ARM GPUs since Mali T624 (2012), NVIDIA GPUs since Tegra K1 (2014), PowerVR GPUs since GX6250 (2014).

If you need support for older devices, or you want additional Crunch compression, then all GPUs that run Vulkan or OpenGL ES 3.0 support the ETC2 format. The resulting image quality is quite high, and it supports one- to four-component texture data. OpenGL ES 2 devices do not support the ETC2 format, so Unity decompresses the texture at runtime to the format ETC2 fallback specifies. For even older devices, usually only ETC format is available. The drawback is that there is no direct alpha channel support. For SpritesA 2D graphic objects. If you are used to working in 3D, Sprites are essentially just standard textures but there are special techniques for combining and managing sprite textures for efficiency and convenience during development. More info
See in Glossary, Unity offers an option to use ETC1 compression by splitting a texture into two ETC1 textures: one for RGB, one for alpha. To enable this, enable the Android-specific Split Alpha Channel option for the Texture when importing a Sprite AtlasA texture that is composed of several smaller textures. Also referred to as a texture atlas, image sprite, sprite sheet or packed texture. More info
See in Glossary. The sprite shaderA program that runs on the GPU. More info
See in Glossary samples both textures and combines them into the final result.

For HDR textures, ASTC HDR is the only compressed format available on Android devices. ASTC HDR requires Vulkan or GL_KHR_texture_compression_astc_hdr support. ASTC is the most flexible format. If a device doesn’t support ASTC HDR the texture is decompressed at runtime to RGB9e5 or RGBA Half, depending on alpha channel usage.

For devices that don’t support ASTC HDR, all devices running Vulkan, Metal, or OpenGL ES 3.0 support RGB9e5, which is suitable for textures without an alpha channel. If an alpha channel or even wider support is needed, use RGBA Half. This takes twice as much memory as RGB9e5.

See the Supported texture formats reference table for detailed information about all supported formats.

Default texture formats, by platform

The following table shows the default formats used for each platform.

Platform	Color model	None	Normal quality (default)	High quality	Low quality (higher performance)
Windows, Linux, macOS	RGB	RGB 24 bit	RGB Compressed DXT1	RGB(A) Compressed BC7	RGB Compressed DXT1
	RGBA	RGBA 32 bit	RGBA Compressed DXT5	RGB(A) Compressed BC7	RGBA Compressed DXT5
	HDR	RGBA Half	RGB Compressed BC6H	RGB Compressed BC6H	RGB Compressed BC6H
WebGLA JavaScript API that renders 2D and 3D graphics in a web browser. The Unity WebGL build option allows Unity to publish content as JavaScript programs which use HTML5 technologies and the WebGL rendering API to run Unity content in a web browser. More info See in Glossary (configurable)	RGB	RGB 24 bit	RGB Compressed DXT1	RGB Compressed DXT1	RGB Compressed DXT1
	RGBA	RGBA 32 bit	RGBA Compressed DXT5	RGBA Compressed DXT5	RGBA Compressed DXT5
Android (configurable)	RGB	RGB 24 bit	RGBA Compressed ASTC 6x6 block RGB Compressed ETC2 RGB Compressed ETC	RGBA Compressed ASTC 4x4 block RGB Compressed ETC2 RGB Compressed ETC	RGBA Compressed ASTC 8x8 block RGB Compressed ETC2 RGB Compressed ETC
	RGBA	RGBA 32 bit	RGBA Compressed ASTC 6x6 block RGBA Compressed ETC2	RGBA Compressed ASTC 4x4 block RGBA Compressed ETC2	RGBA Compressed ASTC 8x8 block RGBA Compressed ETC2
iOS (configurable)	RGB	RGB 24 bit	RGBA Compressed ASTC 6x6 block RGB Compressed PVRTC 4 bits	RGBA Compressed ASTC 4x4 block RGB Compressed PVRTC 4 bits	RGBA Compressed ASTC 8x8 block RGB Compressed PVRTC 2 bits
	RGBA	RGBA 32 bit	RGBA Compressed ASTC 6x6 block RGBA Compressed PVRTC 4 bits	RGBA Compressed ASTC 4x4 block RGBA Compressed PVRTC 4 bits	RGBA Compressed ASTC 8x8 block RGBA Compressed PVRTC 2 bits
tvOS	RGB	RGB 24 bit	RGBA Compressed ASTC 6x6 block	RGBA Compressed ASTC 4x4 block	RGBA Compressed ASTC 8x8 block
	RGBA	RGBA 32 bit	RGBA Compressed ASTC 6x6 block	RGBA Compressed ASTC 4x4 block	RGBA Compressed ASTC 8x8 block
Default	RGBA	RGBA 32 bit	RGBA 16 bit	RGBA 16 bit	RGBA 16 bit

Texture formats, by quality

The table below shows each format available in Unity, and their quality details.

Texture format	Description	Channels	Quality	Bits per pixel	Size of 1024x1024 texture, in MB
RGB(A) Compressed BC7	Compressed RGB or RGBA	RGB or RGBA	High	8	1
RGBA Crunched DXT5	Compressed RGBA, with additional on-disk Crunch compression	RGBA	Low to medium	Variable	Variable
RGBA 64 bit	Uncompressed RGBA, very high precision	RGBA	Very high	64	8
RGBA 32 bit	Uncompressed RGBA	RGBA	High	32	4
RGBA 16 bit	Quantized RGBA	RGBA	Medium	16	2
RGB Compressed DXT1	Compressed RGB (also known as BC1)	RGB	Medium	4	0.5
RGB Crunched DXT1	Compressed RGB, with additional on-disk Crunch compression	RGB	Low to medium	Variable	Variable
RGB 48 bit	Uncompressed RGB, very high precision. Converted to RGBA 64 bit for the GPU	RGB	Very high	48 disk, 64 GPU	6 disk, 8 GPU
RGB 24 bit	Uncompressed RGB. Converted to RGBA 32 bit for the GPU	RGB	High	24 disk, 32 GPU	3 disk, 4 GPU
RGB 16 bit	Quantized RGB	RGB	Medium	16	2
RG Compressed BC5	Compressed two channel (RG)	RG	High	8	1
RG 32 bit	Uncompressed two channel (RG), very high precision	RG	Very high	32	4
R Compressed BC4	Compressed single channel (R)	R	High	4	0.5
R 8	Uncompressed single channel (R)	R	High	8	1
R 16 bit	Uncompressed single channel (R), very high precision	R	Very high	16	2
Alpha 8	Uncompressed single channel (A)	A	High	8	1
RGBA Half	HDR, half-precision (FP16) RGBA, –64k to +64k range	RGBA	High	64	8
RGB Compressed BC6H	HDR, compressed RGB, 0 to +64k range	RGB	High	8	1
RGB9e5 32 Bit Shared Exponent Float	HDR, quantized RGB, 0 to +64k range	RGB	Medium	32	4
RGB(A) Compressed ASTC	Compressed RGB or RGBA, size & quality dependent on block size	RGB or RGBA	Low to high	12x12: 0.89, 10x10: 1.28, 8x8: 2, 6x6: 3.56, 5x5: 5.12, 4x4: 8	12x12: 0.11, 10x10: 0.16, 8x8: 0.25, 6x6: 0.45, 5x5: 0.64, 4x4: 1.0
RGBA Compressed ETC2	Compressed RGBA	RGBA	Medium	8	1
RGBA Crunched ETC2	Compressed RGBA, with additional on-disk Crunch compression	RGBA	Low to medium	Variable	Variable
RGB + 1-bit Alpha Compressed ETC2 4 bits	Compressed RGBA, with alpha values fully opaque or fully transparent	RGBA	Medium	4	0.5
RGBA Compressed PVRTC 4 bits	Compressed RGBA, texture required to be square	RGBA	Medium	4	0.5
RGBA Compressed PVRTC 2 bits	Compressed RGBA, texture required to be square	RGBA	Low	2	0.25
RGB Compressed ETC2	Compressed RGB	RGB	Medium	4	0.5
RGB Compressed ETC	Compressed RGB	RGB	Low	4	0.5
RGB Crunched ETC	Compressed RGB, with additional on-disk Crunch compression	RGB	Low	Variable	Variable
RGB Compressed PVRTC 4 bits	Compressed RGB, texture required to be square	RGB	Medium	4	0.5
RGB Compressed PVRTC 2 bits	Compressed RGB, texture required to be square	RGB	Low	2	0.25
RG Compressed EAC 8 bit	Compressed two channel (RG)	RG	High	8	1
R Compressed EAC 4 bit	Compressed single channel (R)	R	High	4	0.5
RGB(A) Compressed ASTC HDR	HDR, compressed RGB or RGBA, size & quality dependent on block size	RGB or RGBA	Low to High	12x12: 0.89, 10x10: 1.28, 8x8: 2, 6x6: 3.56, 5x5: 5.12, 4x4: 8	12x12: 0.11, 10x10: 0.16, 8x8: 0.25, 6x6: 0.45, 5x5: 0.64, 4x4: 1.0

Supported texture formats, by platform

The table below shows each texture format available in Unity, and the platforms that support them.

Texture format	Windows	macOS	Linux	Android	iOS & tvOS	WebGL (Desktop Browsers)	WebGL (iOS and Android browser)
RGB(A) Compressed BC7	yes (1)	yes (1)	yes	no	no	yes (1)	no
RGBA Compressed DXT5	yes	yes	yes	no (3)	no	partial (2)	no
RGBA Crunched DXT5	yes	yes	yes	no (3)	no	partial (2)	no
RGBA 64 bit	yes	yes	yes	partial (6)	yes	no	no
RGBA 32 bit	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
RGBA 16 bit	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
RGB Compressed DXT1	yes	yes	yes	no (3)	no	partial (2)	no
RGB Crunched DXT1	yes	yes	yes	no (3)	no	partial (2)	no
RGB 48 bit	yes	yes	yes	partial (6)	yes	no	no
RGB 24 bit	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
RGB 16 bit	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
RG Compressed BC5	yes	yes	yes	no	no	yes	no
RG 32 bit	yes	yes	yes	partial (6)	yes	no	no
R Compressed BC4	yes	yes	yes	no	no	yes	no
R 8	yes	yes	yes	partial (5)	yes	partial (5)	partial (5)
R 16 bit	yes	yes	yes	partial (6)	partial (6)	yes (14)	yes (14)
Alpha 8	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
RGBA Half	yes	yes	yes	partial (7)	yes	partial (7)	partial (7)
RGB Compressed BC6H	yes (1)	yes (1)	yes	no	no	yes (1)	no
RGB9e5 32 Bit Shared Exponent Float	yes	yes	yes	partial (4)	yes	partial (4)	partial (4)
RGB(A) Compressed ASTC	no	no	no	partial (8)	yes (10)	no	yes (13 & 10)
RGBA Compressed ETC2	no	no	no	partial (9)	yes	no	yes
RGBA Crunched ETC2	no	no	no	partial (9)	yes	no	yes
RGB + 1-bit Alpha Compressed ETC2 4 bits	no	no	no	partial (9)	yes	no	yes
RGBA Compressed PVRTC 4 bits	no	no	no	no (12)	yes	no	no
RGBA Compressed PVRTC 2 bits	no	no	no	no (12)	yes	no	no
RGB Compressed ETC2	no	no	no	partial (9)	yes	no	yes
RGB Compressed ETC	no	no	no	yes	yes	no	yes
RGB Crunched ETC	no	no	no	yes	yes	no	yes
RGB Compressed PVRTC 4 bits	no	no	no	no (12)	yes	no	no
RGB Compressed PVRTC 2 bits	no	no	no	no (12)	yes	no	no
RG Compressed EAC 8 bit	no	no	no	partial (9)	yes	no	yes
R Compressed EAC 4 bit	no	no	no	partial (9)	yes	no	yes
RGB(A) Compressed ASTC HDR	no	no	no	partial (11)	partial (11)	no	partial (11)

Notes:

1. Except on pre-DX11 level GPUs, or macOS when using WebGL or OpenGL. When not supported, BC6H textures get decompressed to RGBA Half, and BC7 get decompressed to RGBA32 at load time.
2. With linear rendering on web browsers that don’t support sRGB DXT, textures are decompressed to RGBA32 at load time.
3. Except on Android devices with NVIDIA Tegra GPUs; these do support DXT/BC formats.
4. Except on OpenGL ES 2.0 / WebGL 1.
5. When on OpenGL ES 2.0 / WebGL 1: requires GL_EXT_texture_rg extension support.
6. Requires GL_EXT_texture_norm16 or corresponding Vulkan capability on Android.
7. When on OpenGL ES 2.0 / WebGL 1: requires OES_texture_half_float extension support.
8. Requires Vulkan or GL_KHR_texture_compression_astc_ldr OpenGL ES extension.
9. Except on OpenGL ES 2.0; there ETC2 textures are decompressed into the format ETC2 fallback specifies in the Android Build Settings or on the Android tab for the Platform-specific overrides.
10. Except on Apple A7 chip devices (2013).
11. Android: requires GL_KHR_texture_compression_astc_hdr extension. iOS: requires A13 or later chip (2019).WebGL: requires WEBGL_compressed_texture_astc extension and HDR profile. When not supported, the texture is decompressed to RGB9E5 format, losing the alpha channel.
12. Except on Android devices with Imagination PowerVR GPUs; these do support PVRTC formats.
13. Requires WEBGL_compressed_texture_astc extension.
14. Requires EXT_texture_norm16 extension and WebGL 2.

Supported texture formats in WebGL

The following table provides the supported texture formats for WebGL.

Format	Descritpion
ASTC	Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) is an advanced lossy texture compression format. Widely used for mobile browsers / devices.
DXT	Also known as S3 Texture Compression (S3TC), DXT is mainly used for desktop browsers and devices.
ETC2	Ericsson Texture Compression (ETC) is an older lossy texture compression format, lower quality than ASTC, used for mobile browsers / devices.

Additional resources:

• Texture Compression format in WebGL
• Texture Compression format in Android

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