Why Use the Packed Pixels Extension?

Why Use the Packed Pixels Extension?

The packed pixels extension lets you store images more efficiently by providing additional pixel types you can use when reading and drawing pixels or loading textures. Packed pixels may also be faster than unpacked pixels in some cases because less bandwidth (or less processing) is required to transfer them to and from the graphics hardware.

In addition, some of the types defined by this extension match the internal texture formats (see "The Texture Extension") so less processing is required to transfer texture images to texture memory.