HQ Textures / Quantity and performance impact in engine

David1983

Hi folks,
I have little question about textures, does any one know how big the performance impact is when using big / or al lot of textures i scene "per view" ? Is there actually a impact in FPS ?

Eric Chadwick

Yes. If the visible textures exceed the available memory, then the game renderer will slow way down, trying to load and unload textures from disk.

David1983

is there any value i should keep in eye? like what is the max memory i should use per view in current generation games? i guess 8GB ?

Eric Chadwick

This is not an easy thing to answer, it depends on many factors.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Performance/Scalability/ScalabilityAndYou/index.html

An easy rule of thumb, from a solo artist's perspective, is to choose a reasonable texel resolution and try to keep all the texels a consistent size across your scene. For example, just pulling this number out of thin air... 4 texture pixels per centimeter.

Then try to re-use textures as much as possible before it seriously impacts the visual quality.

Edit... as you get towards filling out the scene, profile it on your target platform(s) and see how well it runs. If it lags, find out why, and fix it.