What is the advantage of using a single texture map instead of a multiple textures map on an object? Or what are the advantages of using multiple textures? Thanks

Some rough comparison:

Single texture:
- Pro's: low demand on frame rate, low memory requirements
- Con's: limited looks, litle effects possible

Multiple textures:
- Pro's: lots of looks and effects possible
- Con's: slows down frame rate, requires more memory

Greetz,

Illco

Well, if we're talking about things more like buildings than people, the advantage of multiple textures is it's easy to reuse them in different places and of course you can tile them. The advantage of a single texture is you can batch more drawing calls together because you don't need a state change. nVidia came up with a thing called texture atlasing to try and get the best of both worlds, but although they claim it produces minimal artifacts I'm not convinced (a line of oddly coloured pixels along the edge of an object is really quite noticable in my opinion even if it is only a small number of pixels), and to do tiling with it pixel shaders are needed which rules out all pre-GF5 cards as I understand it (at least, to avoid a huge performance hit). Seems to me that this is a problem just crying out for a solution (and has been for years). I know nothing about hardware implementation but I don't see why some kind of additional index couldn't be used here.