That’s true, but it’s a trade-off rather than a straight win. Hardware formats do have a few disadvantages: 1. Larger size on disk 2. Reduced quality at all M

That’s true, but it’s a trade-off rather than a straight win. Hardware formats do have a few disadvantages: 1. Larger size on disk 2. Reduced quality at all MIP levels 3. Complexity of each platform wanting its own special format. Basis fixes 1 (by adding an extra layer of compression) and 3 (by transcoding to almost any format at load time). But it doesn’t fix 2, and it adds another downside -- decompressing and transcoding is relatively slow.