Android 2D Textures Overrides

When you are building for different platforms, you have to think about the resolution of your textures for the target platform, the size and the quality. You can set default options and then override the defaults for a specific platform.

This page details the Texture Overrides specific to Android. A description of the general Texture Overrides can be found here.

Unless you’re targeting a specific hardware, like Tegra, we’d recommend using ETC1 compression. If needed you could store an external alpha channel and still benefit from lower texture footprint.

Unity can use ETC1 for textures with Alpha, provided they are placed on some 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 will split 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 supported by all hardware vendors.

Textures can be imported from DDS files but only DXT or uncompressed pixel formats are currently supported.

If your app utilizes an unsupported texture compression, the textures will be uncompressed to RGBA 32 and stored in memory along with the compressed ones. So in this case you lose time decompressing textures and lose memory storing them twice. It may also have a very negative impact on rendering performance.