Compression

Keywords: Texture Compression, BC7, DXT

Compression is used to make content smaller, so it'll fit in memory. Most things are compressed, but for VFX the one we need to worry most about is image compression. Different types of compression will handle images differently. They can handle varying numbers of channels. Some compression formats works better if the content in all channels are similar while others don't care. Some textures need to be completely uncompressed to work. An example of this would be VATs.

Descriptions of many common formats can be found here:

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-TextureImporterOverride.html