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Mr_FulanoFlag for United States of America

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Texture Maps and Performance

Hi, I have a question regarding texture mapping and the affect that has on performance.

Lets assume I have a 3D model of a small building. Once I texture the building, I'll have brick, wood, metal and glass textures that will make up the building's texture properties.

So, my question is at what point does too much texturing affect the game's performance?

In other words, lets say I use an average 1024x1024 texture size. How many of those would be too much? Would it be - one, two, three, or is the affects negligible now that processor speed is more powerful. I would assume that mobile games would still fall victim to too much texturing.

If someone can offer some guidance on what is too much texturing. That would be great.

Thanks,
Fulano
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Needhelp121

For desktops I don't think that sort of texturing would cause any problems. However, you're right in mobile devices it may start to cause lag and performance issues. I think two should be safe.
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Hi Satsumo, very good information. You've given me a lot to think about and to research. Do you have any suggestions what I should be looking for? What would I Google?
To get any sort of definition to the answer you need to know what platform you are targeting first. Then you can try looking at hardware specs, also developer blogs are often useful. On platforms with a variety of hardware (like PC or Android), you just have to decide on a minimum spec that you want to support. Its possible that the game could be slow for some people, because there's no way to control what device the user has. Although you can have lower detail graphics for slower machines and you can program a game to deal with varying frame rates.

If you're using something like OpenGL, it can do a lot of texture management for you. But again, that also depends upon the platform and the hardware. Some versions of OpenGL render in a separate thread, and try to organise vertex and texture data efficiently, and some versions do not. A system like Unity gives you less low level control, but it also does a lot of the organising. Then WebGL is different again.
Thank you. Very good answers.