Getting the best performance out of textures
#1
I asked these questions on topfs2's Weekly Report but as I haven't had a reply yet I thought I'd asking here instead and hopefully it will useful for others.

1. He mentioned using four 512x256 'power of two' textures for large textures (backgrounds) but this would result in textures getting upscaled which wouldn’t look good for finer details so I'd like to know whether using four 640×360 textures (to make up a 1280×720 background) would be better than using a single (1280x720) texture? Or would four 1024x512 'power of two' textures be the preferred method?

2. He also said "Scaling and positioning textures in accelerated rendering systems is usually almost for free which means using the border tag in skinning to limit the size of a texture could significantly lower the needed load." but I'm unsure as to what that means.

Thanks.
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#2
Hi - topfs2 is currently on his way to Canada (and either way only has a cell connection to the net) so will likely be unable to reply for a bit Smile

1. That was beagle-board specific. The drivers for it are faster at rendering 4 small textures rather than 1 large one, even though they add up to the same amount of pixels to draw in total. On any "real" hardware it will likely be slightly slower. Don't bother unless you are targetting beagleboard Wink

2. It means that you can utilize the border tag for textures that can be stretched over large areas as the only "detail" in them is in the borders. Things like dialog backgrounds perhaps - I know some of Jezz_X's skins use this trick, where the main "middle" bit of the dialog is actually just 1 pixel (or a row of pixels) in the image, and it's stretched to a constant backdrop.

Cheers,
Jonathan
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#3
Cool, thanks for the reply.

Should we still try to use 'power of two' wherever possible?
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#4
It is optimal as far as memory is concerned on some systems (those systems that don't do NPOT)
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.


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