Texture Sizes and Non-Square Textures

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi! I’m working on creating some really high resolution materials (8k), and I started thinking about this problem the other day:

Say I want to create a road texture. I could create a square texture like I generally do, but a square section of roadway will have more obvious tiling repetition than a non-square texture (say 16k x 4k). I’ve read that as long as the pixel dimensions remain a power of 2 (256, 512, 1024, etc), you can have non-square textures without extra memory loss or extra CPU/GPU processing required (compared to a non-power of 2 number). Does this work even in extreme cases, meaning that a 32,768 x 2,048 texture would be equivalent to a square 8k, as far as memory and processing goes? And is there a hard texture size limit that exists in Blender, where you simply cannot have a pixel dimension higher than x (regardless of RAM)?

2

As far as I know, pretty much any GPU nowadays can support non power-of-2 textures and the only thing to note in Blender is that the memory and performance impact of said textures can increase dramatically as you increase the pixel count.

3

Thanks for the quick reply, Ace! Good to know that current GPUs can handle arbitrary texture sizes these days. I also did a test with some rectangular textures, and they all seemed to require the same amount of memory as a square texture with an equivalent pixel count. It looks like my quandary has been resolved. Thank you!