What is the maximum texture size you typically use.... for vid card compatibility. I have a planet using a texture 1024x1024 jpg. I had to use this size for it to look resonably detailed. I remember reading somewhere going over 256x256 is not good because there are a lot of vid cards that won''t suppport higher. If I were to break this bitmap into 16 parts how would I re-texture the planet. I was thinking of changing the uv values from 0-.25, 25-.5 ..etc Is this how large textures are generally handled? Any advice/algoriths on appying huge textures to surfaces... thanks rhuala

Fire up DirectX Caps Viewer utility from the DirectX SDK entry in your start menu.

--DirectX Graphics Adapter
---- (your video card)
------ D3D Device Types
-------- HAL
---------- Caps

And check these fields:

MaxTextureWidth
MaxTextureHeight

All this utility is doing is encapsulating the D3DCAPS9 struct that you access with IDirect3DDevice9::GetDeviceCaps . So, you can access the max texture sizes values at runtime just as easily, and have code to handle your textures on older cards. If you''re really worried about making textures that are too big for older cards, I suggest just making smaller duplicates that would only get loaded in case the normal ones aren''t supported.