Taking the time to learn about these sorts of compression methods is well worth it, as once you start loading assets of any appreciable scale or number, the savings in asset loading times can add up to be significant, turning what might have been a noticable jarring pause or stutter into something much less noticable.

Think about it, with hardware texture formats, not only are you not having to decode the PNG on the CPU, but you're also literally uploading less data to the GPU overall, since it can be transferred in a compressed form.

Using image formats for texture formats is amateur game development. PNG’s are fine for icons or UI or while you’re still trying to figure out what you’re doing. Once you know, you switch to a faster, no translation required, texture formats that load faster, support physical layers, compression, and are already in BGRA format.

Of course, they might have written the blog post with the intention of drawing attention to themselves and being noticed. These days, I can't bring myself to be upset about that sort of thing - if the content is good, better self-promotion than AI slop or hyping up the next hot investment vehicle.

Yes, because they learnt it somewhere, for example, this article.

I don't get the negativity. Unless you work on bleeding edge R&D, every technique you know has been documented somewhere by someone else. So only the bleeding edge R&D people should write tech blogs?

Anecdotally, even I had known what texture compression is, this article still taught me something: the existence of Tacant View. It looks like quite a neat app.