Xiaomi has introduced its in-house Xring O3 chip, powering the new Xiaomi 18 Fold and Pad 9 Pro Max. A recent Vulkan capability report for the 18 Fold confirms the silicon supports the BCn block-compressed texture format family, specifically BC1 through BC7.
While BC texture decoding is a configurable block licensed by Arm for Mali GPUs, vendors like MediaTek and Google have not exposed this support in Dimensity or Tensor chips. Xiaomi's implementation enables sampling, blitting, and transfer for these formats.
Native BCn support is significant as it removes the need for driver-side software decompression. This improves efficiency for desktop game engines and Windows-on-ARM software, which commonly use BC-compressed assets instead of standard Android ASTC formats.