After just doing a test, it looks like the PVRTC compressor does a MUCH better job at compressing sprites. I am very impressed.
The artifacts that do remain seem to be mostly around edges, but even then they are much nicer looking than the artifacts of Unity 4.5’s compressor.
It looks as though some white is bleeding into some edges due to Photoshop’s obnoxious white-fill-behind-zero-alpha pixels, but that should be resolvable by using TGA for those problem cases.
Thanks, Unity devs!
Is it better than the “best” setting in Unity 4.5, or did they just switch to that as a default?
Cool news though if the compression is indeed better.
@AcidArrow Yes, I believe so, since we are using an IPackerPolicy that always uses 100% quality and noticed a pretty obvious reduction in compression artifacts just by using Unity 5.
Here is a before/after comparison of the same sprite…
Unity 4:
Note that the Unity 5 screen cap has some minor color noise added on our end. That’s not caused by the PVRTC tool.
From the changelog:
It’s about 1/3 the way down a very long page of changes.
Good news! We’ve been having issues with compressed images looking crappy on one of our games… it may be worth dabbling into Unity 5 in a future version.
Wow, that looks like a significant improvement! Really cool.
They should advertise it more. It got far more excited than other more prominent features 
I guess they support PVRTC3 now.
That too, but if you’re still building for an older device I don’t think it’ll magically support it.
Actually I was kind of expecting that it would work on older devices, since there’s no way to tell Unity to use an older version of PVRTC. I suppose it’s possible than the Unity devs overlooked that, though I’ll know pretty soon when I test on my 1st gen iPad Mini.
