Question about moviepacks and fps

[dukevin]

I'm assuming yes, but if I have bigger image files in moviepacks, does this result in loss of fps?

If I have image files twice as big as normal, would there be a significant loss in fps?

[Z-Man]

Depends on your hardware. On reasonably modern GPUs, larger textures shouldn't be too much of a slowdown. We're wasting most of the silicon not doing any complicated shading or multiple texture lookups per pixel, so the limits are mostly given by the speed of the rasterizer. For more concrete data, you'd have to do a benchmark yourself.

[Jonathan]

Something to watch out for: cycle textures. At the start of each round, each cycle on the grid gets its own texture loaded from disk, colored in, and stored on the GPU. If you go crazy and make it 2048x2048, that's 256 MB if there are 16 cycles. For other textures it may be fine, but this will hurt on a full grid.

[Z-Man]

Hah! We're no longer doing that. Well, the coloring and uploading, yes, but not the loading from disk. But yeah, it can potentially fill up your GPU's memory if you go overboard. You almost never see the cycles close enough to make really high res textures look any better, so stick with 512x512 for those.