A technical deep dive into Apple's undocumented Metal Lossy Compression format used in A15/M2 chips, which provides 1:2 compression ratio for textures. The author reverse-engineers the format using Metal heap memory aliasing techniques to understand the block layout and decoding process. This provides valuable insights into Apple's proprietary GPU compression technology that operates transparently to applications.
Background
Apple introduced hardware-accelerated lossy texture compression in their A15 and M2 chips, but the format remains undocumented and proprietary. The compression is handled automatically by the GPU without exposing details to developers.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Apr 25, 2026 at 08:50 PM
- Score
- 7.0 / 10