[Wily Duck]

This is a q/a discussion thread involving viewpoints of appropriate texture resolution usage.

As I just noted in another thread, personally I try to use 512x512 whenever possible. Current generation low-end video cards are quite capable. Is there a good reason why we shouldn't use 512 pixel textures all the time? At what point are there diminishing returns on mipmapping, or should mipmapping simply be disabled on smaller images allowing the video card to figure out the scaling-sampling needed?

Is it time to move up to 1024x1024 res textures? I think most cards can handle 2048x2048 at this point, have to check though.

When I see a texture in a map that's heavily mipmapped like I'm crossing my eyes and squinting, I get this 'ugh...' feeling, knowing it doesn't need to be like that.

Thoughts/ideas/comments on current texture resolutions for UrT?

[Dragonne]

Yes, IMHO, large area textures should be 512 or 1024... but for small ones, you don't need all of that texture area just to scale it down and lose resolution anyway.

It's a judgement call per texture to me... but the trend should be towards larger, more details textures. That's where mine are going.

[žalost (old)]

512x512 are easily achievable, even for me. If some/most UrT assets were updated (or recreated) to fit those dimensions, I doubt it would cause very little, if any, downfall to performance due to how mipmaps and picmips can be enabled on low-end PCs to increase performance. 1024x1024, however, are quite hard. It is doable though. CG textures supplies some pretty big 2048x2048 pixel images.

As far as mapping is considered, I managed to learn something when making my TrueCombat:Elite map. All the textures are 512x512 or bigger, and the default texture scale is set to .25 to keep texture scaling compliant with other textures.

[TRaK (old)]

In my experience, using mainly 1024 textures all over the place in q3 cause a rather significant fps hit on older cards. I've seen some maps where I got a 300% speed boost when those textures were downsized to 512. Honestly, unless it's a texture that needs to be tiled over very large surfaces (e.g terrain), there really isn't a need for 1024 to make things look good. Anyways, it takes a lot more skill to properly create textures that take advantage of the higher res. A well-made 512 texture works just as well if not better than a poorly detailed 1024 one.

512, on the other hand, seems to perform fine. I would definitely choose 512 over 256, and just set the texture scale to 0.25 like keres said.

[NulL]

Am I the only person that suffers from texture thrashing in urbanterror?

[TwentySeven]

null probably yeah.

[{C9}Wolverine (old)]

You can also have multiple textures in that 512x512 texture, sort of like how model skinning is done.

[NulL]

yes but then they wont tile and can bleed into each other with picmip settings.

[J0e]

I would love to see larger more detailed textures...it makes the walls and such seem like is not the same pic tiled 100 times

[žalost (old)]

good textures that are tileable don't look repetitive