Textures larger than 256x256

Yep, mainly Voodoo1 & 2

some of the other older ones (S3 ViRGE, PowerVR PCX etc) don''t either. Often on those the reason is lack of VRAM more than anything.

The Voodoos also have other restrictions such as having to bind a texture to a particular TMU at texture creation time (to do with the SLI mode).

On all modern chips (i.e. TNT onward), 1024x1024 should be fine (provided you have the VRAM to do it)

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Simon O''Connor
Creative Asylum Ltd
www.creative-asylum.com

On this same topic, how worried should I be about non-square textures? I am also developing for a GeForce2 or better audience. I am currently using a texture that is neither square nor a power of 2 and it is fine on my Radeon. Of course I intend to check the device caps and issue an appropriate error if the program is used on an older card, but if a large percentage of video cards out there required square or ^2 textures I may want to break mine up.

Thanks,
LEJ

Non-square textures are pretty OK. Some cards have restrictions concerning the aspect ratio, though. The Voodoo5 supports up to 2048x2048 but the aspect ratio must be between 1:8 and 8:1. Weird, I know...
GeForce2+ is quite hefty you know. Most people have Riva TNT2 cards as far as I know.

- JQ
Full Speed Games. Coming soon.

On my Gf2, I had the ordeal of discoving that my 800x600
texture was getting resized to 1024x1024 to meet the square
requirements, this of course stretches the image. All I wanted is to have some backgrounds and sprites, so I was messing around with D3DXSprite that needs a texture surface. Thanks for asking this question because I was curious about the same thing.

quote:

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Original post by Taulin
On my Gf2, I had the ordeal of discoving that my 800x600
texture was getting resized to 1024x1024 to meet the square
requirements, this of course stretches the image. All I wanted is to have some backgrounds and sprites, so I was messing around with D3DXSprite that needs a texture surface. Thanks for asking this question because I was curious about the same thing.

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FYI: it is most likely resizing to 1024x1024 based on the NON POW2 ability of the card. The next power of 2 for 800 pixels is 1024 and the next pow2 for 600 happens to be 1024 aswell. You can check you TextureCaps (of D3DCAPS8) for D3DPTEXTURECAPS_SQUAREONLY to see if your card needs them to be square (also checking D3DPTEXTURECAPS_POW2 will tell you if the texture needs to be a poser of 2)

The first texture i loaded on my GeForce 4 (MX) was about 2256x2256 (those 3D studio max textures are huge!). I couldn''t figure out why it was so slow, just loading one texture. I didn''t think it was a very good way at all to load textures until i found out the size. Then i realized that the card must be pretty good to load a texture that size so "fast" =)

¬_¬

dont worry about circumstances. just check device caps and use d3dx to gracefully handle silly source data, it doesnt matter what the card manufacturer is or why it requires a certain aspect ratio etc

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