• MeanEYE@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    It’s not going to be less performance in the game. Once uploaded to GPU texture is ready to be used. Just the loading part would be slower.

    • stevehobbes@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      That’s only true if the GPU can fit all of the textures for the whole game in its VRAM, and doesn’t need to store anything else.

      What do you think the chances of that are?

      • MeanEYE@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        It’s not a chance based thing. But sure, sometimes keeping texture in memory is fine.

    • stevehobbes@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      It is loading them dynamically in the background constantly. If those textures are compressed, it’s doing work to load the compressed version into memory, CPU is reading it out of memory, decompressing it and putting it back in memory, then moving it to the GPU.

      It will take 1.5x (assuming 50% reduction in the compressed copy, probably would be worse) the RAM plus the CPU overhead depending on compression algorithm.

      That is happening while you’re playing.

      Unless at load it is decompressing and storing the decompressed textures on your disk, in which case you need 1.5x (or more) of the original storage to play the game and compressing them in the first place is worse if the thing you’re optimizing for is game size on disk (which is what this thread is complaining about).