Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Nuke on February 24, 2004, 10:13:55 pm

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: Nuke on February 24, 2004, 10:13:55 pm

im reading alot of posts that are encoraging use of textures 1024*1024 and 2048*2048. i made a skybox that used six 2048*2048. uncompressed, those textures use up well over 75mb of space. my video card has only 64mb of video memory. even compressed they use a good 22mb. i can imagine what is going to happen when you have a skybox, several new ships with huge textures, and all those weapons effects. dont you think memory constraints could cause some real issues down the line.

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: Omniscaper on February 24, 2004, 10:34:15 pm

I think that would be a good reason to break out the DDS. Its done wonders for my highres ships and planet.

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: KARMA on February 25, 2004, 04:09:14 am

even the minimum compression ratio of JPGs will cut the size of your images by many times, w/o noticeble quality losses
Also 6 1024x1024 for a skybox sounds good to me, but since I donì't play at very high monitor resolutions it may be harder for me to notice differences

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: SadisticSid on February 25, 2004, 04:35:00 am

Is there a compressed form of DDS? The huge filesizes might be very compressible for distribution purposes but even single  objects like Omni's Earth model need like 12MB of disk space for their DDS textures.

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: Lightspeed on February 25, 2004, 07:56:54 am

JPGs are stored uncompressed on the video card = they use EXACTLY the same memory as TGA, they only look worse.

The only texture that can be stored in compressed format on modern vid cards is DDS.

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: Lightspeed on February 25, 2004, 07:57:31 am

Quote

Originally posted by SadisticSid
Is there a compressed form of DDS? The huge filesizes might be very compressible for distribution purposes but even single  objects like Omni's Earth model need like 12MB of disk space for their DDS textures.

DDS *is* a compressed format :rolleyes:

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: KARMA on February 25, 2004, 08:30:34 am

well, I don't know how they are handled by videocards, but a 1024 jpg is around 200k, a 1024 tga is IIRC more than 1mb. I think it was Random Tiger suggesting JPGs for some kind of images, just because their small size.
If when loaded in the video card the have the same size(which mayu happen if they are, for example, converted to bmp) I really don't know

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: Bobboau on February 25, 2004, 08:50:49 am

if you want to know how much space a texture is going to take up in memory, simply multiply it's hight by it's width by it's color depth (if you don't know it's 16 bit, that would be the old PCX textures, TGA aand JPG are both 32 bit) the only exeption would be the dds compressed textures.
so a 1024X1024 32bit picture would be 33,554,432 bits
divide that by 8 any that's how many bytes you have, 4,194,304, so about 4.2 megabytes

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: diamondgeezer on February 25, 2004, 09:00:17 am

What do I need to know about converting stuff to DDS? Simple as just saving in the format?

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: aldo_14 on February 25, 2004, 09:05:47 am

Quote

Originally posted by diamondgeezer
What do I need to know about converting stuff to DDS? Simple as just saving in the format?

Mip-map & the encoding settings, IIRC.

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: Lightspeed on February 25, 2004, 09:13:40 am

Caution with DDS though, the compression might have bad results, you'll have to do a visual checkup after conversion.

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: Flipside on February 25, 2004, 12:04:33 pm

6 x 2048 x 2048 textures sounds severely like overkill for a skybox anyway, this is a game, not a professional rendering package.

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: Bobboau on February 25, 2004, 12:10:06 pm

you'd be suprised

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: Flipside on February 25, 2004, 01:05:48 pm

Oh, I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it's implausable. Even with DDS, 6 textures of that size are certainly going to take up half the memory on a 32Mb card, just for the background?

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: Nuke on February 25, 2004, 07:06:30 pm

so i take it dds is the preferable format to use then. i just downloadind a dds plugin for photoshop.

*runs off to start converting all his tga textures*

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: KARMA on February 25, 2004, 07:10:13 pm

what happen btw if dds is not suuported by vidcard?

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: Nuke on February 25, 2004, 07:14:54 pm

ok, im officially confused. i got the nividia plugin and upon hitting the save button i was greeted with an entire page full of check boxes and option buttons. which ones should i select and which ones should i be afraid of?

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: Lightspeed on February 25, 2004, 07:49:19 pm

Be afraid of DDS.

Use TGA whenever possible.

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: Omniscaper on February 25, 2004, 08:19:46 pm

6x DDS textures bad? My earth model used 8x 2048x2048 textures. I attempted using TGA's for it, and I got a severe performance hit. 60fps less than the DDS for some reason. I suspect its the compression that gives me the performance.

Do NOT be afraid of DDS is you're using high resolution textures. TGA is great for 1024x1024 and below. DDS for 2048x2048 and above.

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: Lightspeed on February 25, 2004, 08:59:26 pm

DDS is for 2048x2048+ textures with lots of stuff inside (rocks, meteor textures, etc) and no colour fades.

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: phreak on February 25, 2004, 09:39:13 pm

i've found the best results when using the one that comes in the Direct X SDK, which should be here (http://www.swooh.com/peon/phreak/DxTex.zip)

Unreal 2003 and 2004 use DDS textures and there are no compression artifacts, so something must be going wrong.

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: Lightspeed on February 26, 2004, 10:14:01 am

I'll yet have to try the one of the DX SDK.

Title: are insanely large textures really a wise thing to do
Post by: Nuke on February 29, 2004, 05:35:59 pm

there is a photoshop plugin by nvidia, which works pretty good.

you can get the plugin here (http://download.nvidia.com/developer/NVTextureSuite/dds.8bi)  and you also need theese (http://download.nvidia.com/developer/NVTextureSuite/DLLs.zip)  dll files in your system dir. i also recomend this (http://download.nvidia.com/developer/NVTextureSuite/DDS_viewer.exe)  to let you preview dds textures in explorer as well as photoshop's file browser.