Texture budget?

#1 You can go over it depends on how many different textures the camera has to render at a given time. You could have a billion textures in your level, if say it has many rooms and they are portalized and each room only shows a few different textures at a time.

#2 That's what 'current scene' means, Tony. :)

You shouldn't get artifacts if you go over, Kevin. You'll just take a bit of a performance hit, because textures will start being swapped in and out of system RAM.

If you're CPU or geometry limited and not fillrate limited, you might not even notice the slowdown.

#3 Some people use the term scene loosely. I know some people equate scene to Level. Anyway, one optimization I try to do is when i have textures in areas, I keep them more grouped, so they take advantage of fast cache. It's better to have the same texture on side by side polys/brushes, than having those textures spread out evenly throughout the whole scene. Chances are, when the camera looks at the next poly/brush, the texture will be still in memory so no need to re-load it, etc.

#4 Thanks guys...


/me begins reading more on portals