Why You Should Use Texture Formats Instead of PNGs in Game Development

Summary

This article argues that shipping PNG images as textures in games is suboptimal, and advocates for using proper texture formats (like KTX or Basis Universal) instead. It explains that PNG is designed for image interchange (lossless, good compression, ubiquitous support), not for texture data which requires features like mipmaps, GPU-native compression, premultiplied alpha, and efficient random access. The author acknowledges workarounds exist but presents a better approach using texture-specific formats that improve performance, reduce memory usage, and streamline the rendering pipeline.