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TGA has been around since 1984 and refuses to retire. Truevision designed it for their graphics cards, and it became the default texture format for a generation of game engines and 3D renderers. The format is dead simple — a small header followed by raw pixel data — which makes it trivially fast to load and write. When a game engine needs to blast thousands of textures into GPU memory, TGA's simplicity is a genuine advantage.
The format supports 8, 16, 24, and 32-bit colour depths, with the 32-bit variant including an 8-bit alpha channel for transparency. Optional RLE compression is available but rarely used — most tools expect uncompressed TGA. The files are large compared to PNG, but when you're loading textures into a GPU that will decompress them anyway, the disk size matters less than the load speed.
You'll find TGA in game asset pipelines, 3D rendering outputs (Blender, Maya), and legacy graphics workflows. Photoshop, GIMP, and most image editors open TGA. For web or general use, convert to PNG (same quality, better compression, same alpha channel support).