textures and frame rate

[blendenzo]

@Mmph!

What some game companies will do is have totally ruined textures that are compressed and resized for lower end machines to get rid of a few FPS.
Then they also leave the originals for people with nice new graphics cards, so they can really get a good experience, The ones the artists intended.

this would not be too hard to do in blender, just have some sort of configure program, that switches the texture folder between small medium and original textures. (you could not do this with a packaged file though)

That’s an excellent tip, Mmph!. I’ll keep it in mind for my future projects. Many thanks to you.

@Mmph!

keep them symmetrical ,
and keep them in multiples of 16 is the best

64x64
128x128
256x256
384x384
512x512
768x768
1024x1024

I would not go over 1024…

Another excellent tip, but leave out the 384x384 and the 768x768 when using Blender. Ashsid showed me the code a while back, and the Blender Game Engine only supports graphics scaled in powers of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 etc…). Everything else gets scaled in memory, leading to varied levels of performance loss, depending on your hardware.

@ashsid

blendenzo,

this is code from Blender sources - file drawmesh.c function set_tpage(), that shows that scaling is done also when size is 384 or 768:

        if (!is_pow2(rectw) || !is_pow2(recth)) {
            rectw= smaller_pow2(rectw);
            recth= smaller_pow2(recth);
            
            scalerect= MEM_mallocN(rectw*recth*sizeof(*scalerect), "scalerect");
            gluScaleImage(GL_RGBA, tpx, tpy, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, rect, rectw, recth, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, scalerect);
            rect= scalerect;
        }

Edit: BTW, the best I can read the code, rectangular textures are safe as long as each dimension is a power of 2 (like 256x64 or something). It doesn’t appear that there would be any noticeable performance loss, since Blender leaves the file as is as long as both dimensions are some power of 2.