Game Development Community

Scaling down hit my fps?

by Adib Murad · in Technical Issues · 07/24/2003 (9:28 pm) · 2 replies

Here is a serious question for me because I do it a lot:

Do I have any performance hit by scaling down my textures over interiors' surfaces? Every window, carpet and even some walls I'm doing are larger textures scaled down, sometimes to 30 percent of the original size, so they get a nice sharp look.

Suppose I have a large wall covered with a stone texture in its original size. Then I scale down the texture to 25 percent. Am I doing any harm to the performance of my scene in Torque?

#1
07/24/2003 (10:46 pm)
Smaller textures increase performance but can be counteracted by having more triangles or larger on-screen surfaces. Smaller textures help with texture-caching, less triangles help with geometry-rates and smaller on-screen surfaces help with fill-rates.

A compromise on quality of texturing/geometry detail and performance is always a difficult call but then that's what LOD is all about.

- Melv.
#2
07/24/2003 (11:48 pm)
Melv, it was useful as ever, but I think we missed something: I'm not talking about scaling down the texture file in Photoshop, for example, and create a smaller texture. I mean apply the same 256x256 texture over a surface in Hammer, then open the Face Properties window and scale de face down by, say, 30 percent. Sorry, scale the face, not the texture.

This give a better look to textures with tiny details, and I'm using and abusing of this scaling thing. I was affraid it would hit the framerate for some reason.

What do you guys think?