Video Game "Textures" --- When a Game Engine uses them....

[myAM]

It appears that polygons may not be the "only" thing you have to worry about in game development. I ran into the concept of "textures." I also crashed into the issue of the textures being 256X256.

 

Quite frankly, as a rule of thumb, how many textures should you have on your game that won't kill it? Also why do some games slow down when the textures image size passes the 256X256 range?

[triath5147]

texture size uses up ur vid card and ram. Older vid cards like voodoo 3 or similar can only handle 256 textures. your current vid cards, be it nvidia or ati can handle texture sizes at 1024 and above now. but the larger your texture size the more memory it sucks up. Once again it is important to know, what game genre your creating. an overhead isometric camera, where ur looking at a whole battlefeild of soldiers, you could get away with a texture for that model of maybe 128 or 256 depending on your zoom factor, for 3rd person where ur about 30 feet from the player, use a 512 texture, and if ur even closer, maybe a 768 texture. Maybe people are surprised, when they make their character texture at 1024, and I tell them to scale it down to 512 or 256 that they dont lose the look they wanted or the detail. Because once your playing in game, first off the camera is farther away and you lose detail anyway, secondly due to game play, and motion of the character, you dont notice things as well. So its better to save memory with texture size when possible.