The game has around 70 unique textures of various sizes, these take a while to decode, around 1.5 seconds in total.

1.5 seconds is not long, the problem is that this occurs when a texture is first loaded into the memory by render, when this happens decoding is triggered, which freezes render thread for the duration, causing micro-stutters. This is not a big deal overall, but it typically happens in the first few moments of the gameplay which creates an impression that the game as a whole is slow and is generally unpleasant.

Today I added compressed texture support into the engine and updated our models to make use of this new feature. Compressed textures do not require decoding as well as using less memory. The result is lower memory requirement for the game as a whole as well as smoother gameplay.