OpenGL and atlasing

leilei

It's 2011. Is it even practical to optimize by packing different non-tiled textures into one image for many effects (billboards, decals etc) anymore with today's hardware?

What I also want to know is how the performance gain is on portables these days as upposed to separate unique textures used.

What about the mipmap edge bleeding risk of it all?

equil

yeah. texture resolution, memory, cpu speed and all that has increased like crazy but drawcalls are pretty much where they were 5-10 years ago. so using few materials / being able to draw stuff in few batches is still really vital. not as much of an issue on desktops but for mobile stuff it's pretty important to atlas things.

as for edge bleeding artefacts... i don't really know if there's a good way to completely eliminate them. a very small amount of padding can help up close if you really need them.

metalliandy

Yea, I think so. The reason being is that todays hardware is actually 2005/2006 hardware, for the most part (consoles).

r_fletch_r

leilei wrote: »

It's 2011. Is it even practical to optimize by packing different non-tiled textures into one image for many effects (billboards, decals etc) anymore with today's hardware?

What I also want to know is how the performance gain is on portables these days as upposed to separate unique textures used.

What about the mipmap edge bleeding risk of it all?

It definately worth doing on Android, state changes are still a big slow down