Real-Time Rendering with JPEG-Compressed Textures

Variable-rate image compression formats like JPEG offer high compression efficiency but are rarely used in real-time rendering due to requirements such as fast and random texel access. This work explores JPEG-based variable-rate texture compression on modern GPUs, comparing it to fixed-rate formats BC1 and ASTC. Using deferred rendering with block-level decoding, our approach achieves higher quality than BC1, competitive quality with ASTC, and sub-1 ms per-frame decoding on an RTX 4090, showing its feasibility for deferred or visibility-buffer pipelines.