[Martinus]

I was wondering, what would be a bigger GFX card killer a 1024*1024 map or a crapload of small texture maps?
Would a massive amount of tiled maps actually have a noticable impact?

[Darkage]

I don't think the size of the map wil effect the GFX card to much trouble, some cards just resize it to 512*512 or at prety old cards it would resize them to 256*256..

I think the most GFX killer is the butt load of texture maps. As it needs to load lets say 24 maps instead of one 1024*768 map.


Hope that helps abit;)

[Rampage]

Originally posted by darkage
I think the most GFX killer is the butt load of texture maps. As it needs to load lets say 24 maps instead of one 1024*768 map.

And that'll be Homeworld models.  The Taiidan TRIKKOR (spelling??) has about 20 individual maps.  And they are so SMALL!!!!  But the good thing is that those maps are used interchangably.

[Killfrenzy]

The Taiidan WHAT?

[Martinus]

I thought that a lot of smaller maps might hit a GFX card harder.

What I was also thinking of was using a small map (64*64 perhaps) and tiling large areas with it, something like a 16*16 grid which would effectively have the same resolution as a single 1024*1024 map. Any problems with using this approach?

Thanks for your feedback guys

[Nico]

Originally posted by Maeglamor

What I was also thinking of was using a small map (64*64 perhaps) and tiling large areas with it, something like a 16*16 grid which would effectively have the same resolution as a single 1024*1024 map. Any problems with using this approach?

yes: for fighters, that sux.

[Martinus]

No this is for a capship. I would always stick to using single map texturing (or as close to single map as possible) for fighters.

Why does it suck? Do you think it looks bad or does it have performance killing potential? (oooh poetic )

[Eternal One]

It doesn't actually "suck" to use multiple maps on fighter. But it is true that it's more efficient to keep the number of texture maps on fighters to the minimum. This is because of a concept called "state changes". When a polygon is rendered, the rendering api has to execute a "state change" every time it encounters a texture map which is not the same used on the last polygon rendered. This induces a performance penalty. Since there's usually a large number of fighters in the game scene, amount of state changes can quickly become high enough to cause stalls.

I see the case a bit different for capital ships. You can get away with less state changes if less texture maps, yes. But it's only marginal since there's never the same amount of capital ships as there's fighters. Again on the other hand, less texture maps means less loading of bitmaps by 3d card. But then again, Fs2 doesn't support texture compression. So it's really not that simple.

I'd say, use minimum amount of maps for fighters, and medium amount for capital ships. Then you can do tiled texturing to save texture memory, and the total amount of texture memory is probably less than if you would squeeze it all into a one big map. Also remember that with capital ships they're quite often partly outside the screen. Texture maps used in areas that are offscreen you don't have to process, when with one single map everything would have to be processed always.