About TGA Files
TGA Image
TGA (Targa) is a raster graphics format used in game development and video editing.
Family
Raster & Vector Images
Extension
.tga
MIME Type
image/x-tga
Can Use As
HOW TGA
CAME TO BE.
TGA — Truevision Advanced Raster Graphics Adapter — shipped in 1984 as the native format for Truevision’s TARGA and Vista graphics cards, the first affordable boards that could display 24-bit color on a PC. Before TARGA, PC graphics maxed at 256 colors; after it, the prosumer 3D and video-production markets boomed. Every early 3D rendering package (3D Studio, Wavefront, LightWave) defaulted to TGA output.
TGA is simple and robust: uncompressed or RLE-compressed raster pixels, optional alpha channel, no metadata to speak of. That simplicity made it the default inter-app format for the game industry for 15 years — texture pipelines for Quake, Unreal, Half-Life, and every pre-2005 3D game ran on TGA files. Today TGA survives in legacy game modding communities and 3D rendering pipelines where someone wants a "just pixels, no surprises" file.
CURIOSITIES &
TRIVIA.
Every texture in the original Quake (1996), Half-Life (1998), and Unreal (1998) was a TGA file.
Truevision's TARGA board (1987) let PC users display 16.7 million colors — an extravagance at the time.
TGA's optional alpha channel is why the format became the default for texture work before PNG existed.
The format stores pixels bottom-to-top by default, confusing anyone writing their first parser.
NASA used TGA extensively in the 1990s for rendering spacecraft animations — many public-domain archive shots are TGA files.
STRENGTHS &
LIMITATIONS.
Strengths
- Extremely simple — trivially easy to read and write.
- Lossless with optional RLE compression.
- Supports 8, 16, 24, and 32-bit color with alpha channel.
- Universal in legacy game development and 3D rendering pipelines.
Limitations
- No metadata, no color profile, no gamma correction.
- Aging — PNG and EXR cover its use cases with better compression.
- Bottom-up pixel order trips up newcomer parsers.
- Not a web format — browsers don't display TGA natively.
Typical Sizes & Weights
512×512 game texture (uncompressed)
~768 KB
2K render output (uncompressed)
~12 MB
4K render with alpha (RLE)
20-40 MB
Technical Specifications
- MIME type
- image/x-targa
- Extensions
- .tga, .icb, .vda, .vst
- Compression
- None or Run-Length Encoding (RLE)
- Bit depths
- 8, 16, 24, 32 bits per pixel
- Byte order
- Little-endian
CONVERT FROM
TGA
Common Use Cases
Game textures, video post-production
Related Formats
Popular comparisons
TGA vs JPG
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
TGA vs PNG
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
TGA vs WEBP
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
TGA vs AVIF
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
TGA vs GIF
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
TGA vs BMP
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
Popular TGA conversions
The most-requested destinations when starting from TGA.
Frequently Asked Questions about TGA
Frequently Asked Questions
TGA (TGA Image) is an image format used to store raster graphics — a two-dimensional grid of pixels describing a picture. It is part of the raster & vector images family and designed around a specific trade-off between file size, visual fidelity, and feature support (transparency, colour depth, compression type). Photographers, web designers, and content creators choose TGA when its particular strengths match the publishing target.
Most desktop photo viewers (Windows Photos, macOS Preview, GIMP, Photoshop, Affinity Photo) open TGA natively. On mobile, iOS Photos and Google Photos display TGA in the gallery when supported by the OS. If the format is rare or new, convert to JPG or PNG first — both are universally readable — using our TGA to JPG or TGA to PNG converter.
Upload the TGA to KaijuConverter and pick a target format (JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, TIFF, BMP, SVG, PDF). The conversion runs in the browser via ImageMagick and returns a download in seconds. No account or installation required; both input and output delete automatically within two hours.
It depends on the task. JPG is the smallest file size for photographs; PNG is lossless with transparency; TGA has its own niche that may favour colour depth, animation, or encoding efficiency over one or both of those. For the final web publish, test all three and measure file size plus visible quality on real content.