Game Development Community

Texture Sizes

by Ironbelly Studios · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 01/27/2005 (3:29 pm) · 8 replies

Curious as to what the dev. teams thoughts are on texture sizes and engine performance? For most base map textures we are keeping them at 1024x1024 with large open terrain textures probably going to be 2048x2048 ..
for character textures we are trying 1024x1024 and 512x512.. the rest of the textures will vary from 256x256 - 512x512 depending on the size of the object..

Wondering what people have experienced with texture sizes both in their levels as well as their models and what they are using
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Torque Owner Kevin Johnson
#1
01/27/2005 (3:45 pm)
Were using 1024x1024x32 for everything. No probs on mid-end systems. At this point its mainly placeholder stuff cause its a good round number, and our geometry is still very limited..I am also curious about filesize.. some of our test textures/ normal maps are like 5MB but since textures are instanced could it be better...I'm sure i'll have to bring em down a bit so whats a good target ??

Torque Owner Brian Ramage
Black Jacket Games
#2
01/27/2005 (4:21 pm)
Try making them jpegs instead of a lossless image file like .png. At some point here we'll have .dds support so you can use DXT compression to store to disk (8x compression). I think .jpeg is going to be better in many cases though.

Associate Tom Spilman
Sickhead Games
#3
01/27/2005 (6:28 pm)
Well jpg will not be better for video memory. DDS can be used directly by the video hardware on all shader cards (i think this is correct). DDS looks good for most noisy textures and will give you significant video memory savings at runtime. DDS is the way to go if you want to use alot of high res textures.

Torque Owner Ironbelly Studios
#4
01/27/2005 (10:19 pm)
Yea.. the thing about jpg's is that the engine will have to uncompress it before using it(I think) whereas not with a png. Even so if you are using 8bit PNG files for most textures you can get them looking real good and keep the file sizes down around 200kb or so

Associate Tom Spilman
Sickhead Games
#5
01/27/2005 (10:35 pm)
Well currently both JPG and PNG are uncompressed once read from disk, but PNGs are a good choice for images that can safely be palletted.

Torque Owner Brian Ramage
Black Jacket Games
#6
01/28/2005 (5:19 pm)
Kevin was talking about file size. Jpeg will generally compress better on disk than a .dds with DXT compression. In video memory however, it will take up 8x more space.

For downloadable games where size is critical, the disk size is more important than the video. Depends on what you are doing.

Associate Tom Spilman
Sickhead Games
#7
01/28/2005 (11:52 pm)
Your right... I misread his post. =)

Torque Owner Kevin Johnson
#8
01/29/2005 (11:17 am)
I think i actually hijack this thread from ryan...my bad..:)