Calculating texture sizes / graphics card requirements.
Hello Polly Count people!
I've been playing around with the idea of trying to build my own game (well, me and my brother) and something that's been bugging me is texture sizes and poly counts (how I found your forum).
I've been doing some reading over the last few months and people are all over the place on poly counts and texture sizes. The general consensus seems to be 'It depends on what you're doing'. So I was reading UDK's documentation on textures (http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/TextureSupportAndSettings.html) and came to their bit on Mips and compressed texture memory requirements.
I'm curious what the numbers they give mean. Is that the amount of graphics memory that will be used to load the image in-game? Or is it just the amount of memory that will be taken up on the hard drive?
This is the video card I have in my machine: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130575
If, for example, I wanted to build a game to run smoothly on computers with similar specs to mine how would I go about estimating such a thing?
Is there a way to approximate cost of a 1024 texture vs. a 512 texture? Or a model with 200 vert and a 1024 texture vs. a model with 800 verts and a 512 texture?
I've read blogs and guilds were people talk about having an 'expensive model', like a statue, and having to cut down on detail around it / hide it in court yard so they can squeeze more detail in were the statue isn't visible etc. I can't find out how to calculate this sort of thing though. It doesn't have to be precise but a nice rule of thumb would be very useful.
Thanks! I know that this is a question that gets asked frequently but it's normally very vague and then gets pretty vague answers.
I've been playing around with the idea of trying to build my own game (well, me and my brother) and something that's been bugging me is texture sizes and poly counts (how I found your forum).
I've been doing some reading over the last few months and people are all over the place on poly counts and texture sizes. The general consensus seems to be 'It depends on what you're doing'. So I was reading UDK's documentation on textures (http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/TextureSupportAndSettings.html) and came to their bit on Mips and compressed texture memory requirements.
I'm curious what the numbers they give mean. Is that the amount of graphics memory that will be used to load the image in-game? Or is it just the amount of memory that will be taken up on the hard drive?
This is the video card I have in my machine: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130575
If, for example, I wanted to build a game to run smoothly on computers with similar specs to mine how would I go about estimating such a thing?
Is there a way to approximate cost of a 1024 texture vs. a 512 texture? Or a model with 200 vert and a 1024 texture vs. a model with 800 verts and a 512 texture?
I've read blogs and guilds were people talk about having an 'expensive model', like a statue, and having to cut down on detail around it / hide it in court yard so they can squeeze more detail in were the statue isn't visible etc. I can't find out how to calculate this sort of thing though. It doesn't have to be precise but a nice rule of thumb would be very useful.
Thanks! I know that this is a question that gets asked frequently but it's normally very vague and then gets pretty vague answers.
Replies
You'll need to monitor your given stats in the scene and make judgements for yourself. UDK gives you a lot of tools for this; you can check out things like texture density, shader complexity and lighting complexity in the editor viewports or you can get statistics in the content browser. When running the game, there should be a number of 'STAT X' (where X is an option) console commands that will give you more information about performance statistics for your scene.
I'll see if I cna write a guide on all this stuff over the weekend. Retrospectively, I've never actually seen a good one