By now, you may have heard about glTF, or JPG in 3D, to put it simply. 

On the xHighlight  Export dialog, you may also find an option KTX2 as shown below. 

Ok, I'm with you. When I saw it the first time, it looked super nerdy to me too.

It still does, but hopefully the loading time reduction, thanks to the 3X to 6X cuts in file size and memory consumption, will justify this little inconvenience for us.

In short, KTX stands for Khronos Texture, which is an efficient, lightweight container format for reliably distributing GPU textures to diverse platforms and applications. xStudio ​​​​​​​supports the 2nd version of this format, hence KTX2. 
 

The compression could help load a 3D model in seconds, rather than minutes, which is huge to our impatience these days. It literally means whether or not the target audience can see 3D, before they are bored away. 

As the usage rises, hopefully the world will gradually grow into it, similar to Https, JPG, or GPT. 

For now, I'd just cover my nose to use this acronym, and explain it quickly as "a texture compression to speed up loading". 

More details can be found on the Khronos Group page. 

Now a natural question is: if KTX2 becomes so efficient, why not just apply it behind the scene? Why expose this option after all? 

Yeah, it'd be ideal to use it everywhere, so that we wouldn't have to bother with this nerdy term at all. The challenge is that not all 3D glTF viewers support KTX2 yet. So when you you are hosting glTF, it'd be wise to verify the viewer first.

The babylon viewer and ​​​​​​​the Khronos sample viewer both handle KTX2 well.  ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The former works well with geometry compression too.