Performance and PBR Textures

David1983

hey guys!
I have a question about pbr textures... i would like to know how expensive they are for engines? Does anyone have alreday some experience with pbr textures ?

ZacD

I don't have any exact numbers, but Remember Me uses physically based rendering, and runs on the PS3/Xbox 360. It doesn't have to have a huge impact on performance. A metalness/roughness workflow uses less texture memory than color specular.

EarthQuake

Much too vague of a question.
How expensive compared to what?
What size textures?
How many inputs?
What sort of game?
What hardware spec?
etc?

In general, like Zac says, PBR textures aren't any more expensive than older style d/n/s/g textures, and sometimes less expensive (as you can pack certain materials into single channels of one image).

David1983

as you alreday wrote... ompared to "simple" textures, like diffuse, normal, spec, ao...
ok, cool i thought they are much more expenisv on the performance...

stevston89

Worth noting with the metalness workflow you can get down to just using 3 textures if you utilize you RGB channels properly. So just as cheap if not cheaper.

Ashaman73

PBR is not a new technology introduced with PS4/XBox One, it is just an other approach to render photorealistic images.

It depends a lot on the capability of hardware, in a way it is like the transition from hand painted texture to normaled textures. You dont need to paint all the information for a surface (in this case it was the lighting information) onto the texture, you just define a new texture (normal map) and let the render engine handle it.
PBR is the next step in this direction: don't paint any artificial light/material information onto the texture, just the pure physical properties and let the rest be handled by the engine, things which has been done to some degree for a long time now (specular maps, normal maps etc. which are a description of the surface material). The trick is, that you should take now physical correct values for e.g. specular values instead of painting some spec maps until it looks good.

Xoliul

Texture memory wise it can definitely be cheaper when you want to achieve the exact same thing.
Shaders tend to be a bit more expensive, as well as some other tech stuff surrounding it, but it's not dramatic.