Hi everyone!
Unity has increased the iOS Player minimum specs to iOS13 and above on Unity 6, thus removing support for iPhone 5/5c. OpenGLES 2.0 support was also removed, requiring GLES3.0+ for Android Players.
While the legacy PVRTC texture compression format was the only compressed option for older Power-VR based phones, the recommended formats for newer phones are the newer ETC and ASTC formats as they both provide improved quality. To learn more about the recommended compression format per platform, see https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.0/Documentation/Manual/texture-choose-format-by-platform.html.
Both PVRTC and the legacy ETC encoder require the use of 3rd party PVRTexTool utility, which may no longer be supported for newer macOS versions. As a result, we have decided to deprecate the PVRTC format and the opt-in legacy ETC compressor the Unity 6.1 release, and aim to soon remove those.
This will reduce our developers’ maintenance overhead, allowing us to spend more time on meaningful improvements to performance and stability, as well as new features.
Note: ETC is still supported through the default Texture Compressor setting (Edit->Project Settings->Editor->Other->Texture Compressors)
Our analytics data indicate that ETC and ASTC are the most used formats on Unity Editor. However, to ensure no negative impact on users, we are also investigating and evaluating all possible dependencies on PVRTC.
Your feedback is essential - so if you are currently using PVRTC and don’t envision switching to ETC or ASTC, please let us know your use cases and share any insights you would like us to consider moving forward!