Textures: How many pixels or how many bites?
I was wondering about texture map sizing conventions I commonly see for assets developed for games.
When artists are made to produce textures of a particular size (512X512 for example) is it done because of the amount of memory it is assumed a texture of that size will tax the gameplay engine (in kb) or;
Do game engines have dimension limitations when it comes to pixels per texture?
If I created a 256 x 256 texture at say 70kb and a 6400 x 6400 at 70kb, do they create the same burden for a gaming engine?
In 3dmax the seems to be no difference in framerate or performance if I have two textures that are the same size memory wise but vastly different in pixel dimension and I'd like to know if this is the case with gaming engines.
When artists are made to produce textures of a particular size (512X512 for example) is it done because of the amount of memory it is assumed a texture of that size will tax the gameplay engine (in kb) or;
Do game engines have dimension limitations when it comes to pixels per texture?
If I created a 256 x 256 texture at say 70kb and a 6400 x 6400 at 70kb, do they create the same burden for a gaming engine?
In 3dmax the seems to be no difference in framerate or performance if I have two textures that are the same size memory wise but vastly different in pixel dimension and I'd like to know if this is the case with gaming engines.
Replies
some consoles and persistent platforms do have a max texture size, dimension wise, but usually it is because of memory. The main thing to pick up here is that in video memory, the filesize of your image file (in jpg, png or tga etc) won't really matter. just the resolution, bit depth and amount of channels.
from a visual perspective the following things might matter