This can be engine specific, I suggest asking your programmer. In a recent discussion, I heard 3x512x512 cost more than 1x1024x1024 in a friend's game engine because it's designed for less textures at larger sizes.
you can only load a single texture at a time, unless you do multitexturing (multiple textures layered on top of each other) so to be more precise one texture a "texture unit" normally your card can access like 4-16 textures at the same time, but not like per object, cause when you render a model that consists of multiple…
The reason to stick to large maps over multiple smaller ones comes from it being better digestible for the video cards. Both, Nvidia and ATI have enough documentation begging you to not ever use 4 small textures if you can fit it all in 1 large one. Ideally you'd merge 4 or 8 character skins into 1 4096 map... but then…
well if its an rts I assume the units are rather small ? think of average pixel area your unit will take on the screen and what your "targeted" screenres is (like 1200x1k..) it makes no sense that your textures are much bigger than the number of pixels they normally use on the screen. and about graphics, I wouldnt worry so…
Yes, ask your programmer. It depends how they use texture cache. But it also depends on the layout of your scene, how often the texture is rendered. Everytime a texture needs to be rendered onto a surface, it needs to be sent to the texture cache. There's only so much room in there, so textures that aren't being used are…
Generally, putting more on one sheet will mean the other parts are in memory even though the corresponding models may not be. In an RTS you'll probably have all units in memory anyway so you're probably free to combine their textures as much as you want. Don't go over 2048x2048, though, some older cards (earlier GeForce…
[ QUOTE ] SF: What confuses me is that games like HL1 or DOAXBV (the latter I know because someone ripped a model from it into UT2003) use one texture per UV group. That's roughly twenty small textures per model. In HL1 all MP models are reUVed to use only one texture map so it's not an engine limitation. Why would you…