Texture sizes

[mixedmeters]

I know other engines load the texture into RAM does unreal do that too?

What is an appropriate texture size. I have a lot of textures in the .tga format that are 16 megs. Is that too big? Should I scale the res down?

[Zomy]

I think the max support is 4096x4096 for textures.

[Solid Snake]

Unreal compresses textures to the DXT formats, either DXT1 or DXT5. I'm not sure if it does DXT3, although DXT3's functionality is something I don't use much in my own engines.

Unreal sends texture data to the GPU ram if possible otherwise it chooses the next best location. This technicality is usually left to the platform video drivers (in this case either DirectX chooses or nVidia / ATI drivers choose).

[mixedmeters]

Thanks guys, but is 16 MB too big for textures?

[Solid Snake]

It won't be 16mb in the video ram.

[mixedmeters]

How much will it be?

[Blade[UG]]

Depends on compression rate when you DXT compress it. In UE2, I almost always used DXT3 because some older video hardware had problems with DXT1, and I didn't need the extra alpha abilities of DXT5. One guideline that I always used in UE2, and I'm pretty sure it would still apply, would be that no texture needs to be larger than the surface you use it on, so there's no point to having a surface that's only 500 pixels using a 512x512 or 1024x1024 texture.

[sergg]

check this out
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/TextureSupportAndSettings.html

[sergg]

there's a lot of useful info on UDN site