Texture size

SketchUp
1

What’s worse: have many medium-sized textures in a file or have some but large-sized textures?

2

if you optimise any texture with ImageOptima or similar, they will behave much better, even at large sizes…

screen grabs and PS, can be the worst, so I crop them to the face size [Make Unique Texture] and run that through ImageOptima…

I often see > 90% reductions without visible quality loss…

john

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3

In both cases they take up memory of your graphics card (or even worse take RAM away from other applications if it’s an integrated chip). For comparison you need to define how many textures of what size you want to compare.

  • In the end, the total number of pixels stored in memory affect memory consumption.
    • As far as I know, graphics cards still work internally with rectangular textures (matrices) with dimensions of power of 2. I don’t know what impact a rectangular texture not matching 2x dimensions affect memory consumption.
    • Graphics cards can have a maximum texture size limit (e.g. 8096×8096), so if you compare 256 1024×1024 textures against a single 16192×16192 texture, the latter would be at advantage because it is not displayed at full resolution.
  • Loading and unloading many textures into memory (or switching textures) also takes time and could affect frame rate. Therefore computer games prefer a texture atlas (single non-repeatable texture with all textures from faces baked in).

→ I would not care much about a texture atlas since we often have repeatable textures in SketchUp.
→ For better interactivity, I keep texture resolutions in SketchUp very low (for example downscaled to optimal resolution and cropped with Texture Resizer).
→ After exporting for rendering, I replace the resulting texture folder with the original high-resolution textures.

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