Good Day!
I’d like to ask if I were to use no mipmaps on a mobile game, can it greatly affect performance?
Note that the game I am currently creating is a first person mobile game, that has all textures unlit, and the textures are very simple.
And does importing textures with low resolution help with performance?
Also I have set the game to be on a LDR setting.
Thanks!
Hi, lack of mipmaps will definitely hurt performance, and also graphical quality will suffer.
When objects are at a distance, the texture size will be large compared to the number of screen pixels that are being rendered. To render adjacent pixels on the screen, the GPU will need to read individual texels (texture pixels) from separate areas of the texture. When reading the texture data from memory, adjacent chunks of texels are loaded into a texel cache on the GPU and so without mipmaps, most of the cache will be loaded with data that’s useless for adjacent pixels, and the GPU will spend more time waiting for texture data to load from main memory. Mipmaps allow the GPU to use texture data at about the same resolution as the onscreen pixels so the cache is more effective.
Mipmaps also store an average of multiple texels at full resolution. Without mipmaps, it will read just a single random texel from the high resolution texture so you will see a lot of graphical shimmering when you move the camera as different texels are selected.
They add 30% to your texture memory cost but they’re there for a reason. You’d be better off using lower resolution textures with mipmaps to save memory, and it will run faster and probably look better.
Okay! Thank you so much!