Hi, I’ve been searching for this on google this afternoon and found nothing. I have a lead at my job that ask us to use pgn for the sake of having small size texture folder for our project. we work on a surgical simulator, our scene are very small, often with 4 to 5 static mesh and 5 ot 8 voxelized mesh, with the use of few dynamic tools mesh by the user. Our texture folder size is 4 gig. I wonder if we can go tga all the way with no fear of doubling our texture size folder and scene, without heavy impact on fps and compile and loading time?
As far as I know, texture file format only comes in play when you first import (or reimport) the texture for the engine to compress it and save it as an asset. After that it is not needed anymore and you could delete your source texture if you’d want. UE uses DXT for most of the compression settings so the memory footprint will purely depend on the compression settings you use and having pngs or tgas as a source file will not change anything.
So the source format size only affect our backup disk when we want to keep them safe. That’s true, I noticed that when I import textures back from unreal it converts them to targa whenever the format I uploaded first.
Thanks
Well I just check the uasset and there is a huge variation in file size even if they mostly are 4096x4096. Some textures needed to be 16 bit for our voxel objects to interpret them better. Those 16 bit are the biggest ones. Will doubling the size using 16 bit texture instead of 8 bit will impact the fps compile or load time?
Yep source file format/compression settings will only affect your backup disk afaik.
Also, yes, since textures are squared, the data in them grow exponentially the bigger they are. You can fit 4 2K texture in a 4k texture, and 16 1K texture so you can see that the bigger they get, the even bigger the memory footprint will be. Having 16bits per pixel even drastically further increases that effect.
A single 16bit 4K texture is not bad itself if you really need it. Just need to budget and manage the rest of your asset to make sure you stay in the memory limit of your targeted hardware.
Nowadays high end pc games use multiple 4K textures for a main character so it all depends on what you want to do with your app/game.