Hi, I am working on a Myst-like game (the name of the game is Amarhys, I already posted topics about it on Gamedev.net) and I just finished to implement a 360 panoramic interface (I use a cube with a user point of view in the center of the cube). The six view textures are rendered under 3DS Max (each view is 1536x1536, the minimum resolution to get a good looking aspect). I concatenated all these views in a single 4096x4096 texture I use to map the six faces, playing with texture coordinates). However, during the game, when I click to change from one view to another, it takes about 3 secondes to display the new environnement. These 3 secondes include : - loading texture from HDD in memory (I cannot directly load the file into a texture using D3DXCreateTextureFromFileEx because the JPEG is embedded in a global data file). The JPEG testure is about 3MO. - creating texture from loaded JPEG using D3DXCreateCubeTextureFromFileInMemoryEx. The texture is loaded in video memory (D3DPOOL_MANAGED), only one MipMap level, without any filtering (D3DX_FILTER_NONE both for Filter and Mipfilter) - mapping of the texture on the cube (vertex buffer is already created in video memory and is not updated, only the texture is updated with D3DDevice->SetTexture) I have to perform some additional tests but I guess 80% of the time is spent in CreateTexture phase (indeed, 3Mo is a small amount of data to load from the disk and later, when the texture is already loaded in video memory, I did not notice any slow down in the display when the panoramic view is rotated by the player). Then, my question is : how to optimize the texture creation phase ? - Maybe I should not create a new texture each time but rather load the JPG in an existing one using D3DXLoadSurfaceFromFileInMemory ? - Maybe I should load the texture in system memory (and transfer it later in video memory)? Note : the texture size (when uncompressed) is about 50Mo. The, if I want to prefetch texture (when I reach a view, I can load in advance all panoramic texture of neightboor views), I have to load them in system memory (video memory is too small). Thank you in advance for your answer (and for spending time to read this topic) Regards Amarhys

There's a few things that are slow:

Loading from the HDD

Decompressing the JPEG

Creating the texture surface

Uploading it to video memory
If I were you, I'd store the texture as a system memory texture, then upload it to video memory when needed. If you're using the managed pool, then D3D will take care of moving the texture in and out of video memory, and you can give it hints (UnloadTexture() and PreloadTexture()).

watch out, there are plenty of video cards out there that cannot handle a a 4096x4096 texture. assuming you have more of these big textures than can fit into memory all at once, why not use DXT compression in a DDS file (DXT1, since there is no alpha)? for maximum loading speed, you can write your own DDS file loader. it's not too difficult to create a DDS loader which is much faster than the D3DX version, since you can bypass all the filtering and re-formatting stuff (you can blast a DXT-formatted DDS file into memory with a single memcpy). also, consider using a cube map (again DDS format), each face 1024 x 1024.

Quote:Original post by Scoob Droolins
watch out, there are plenty of video cards out there that cannot handle a a 4096x4096 texture.

All ATi cards only support up to 2048x2048 texture resolution in fact. At least all the ATi cards listed in the DirectX caps spreadsheet (In the DX SDK, up to X850) only do 2048x2048.

Thanks to all of you for your answers.

The problem is that whatever solution I use, 1024x1024 resolution is not enough to texture each face of the cube. I found that 1536x1536 was the minimum "acceptable" , which meant 6 textures of 2048x2048 in memory, that's why I created a 4096x4096 "optimized" texture which represents less data (in amount of bytes).

Maybe the way I implemented the cube texturing is wrong and using some additional texture filterings I could use 1024x1024 textures ? I used ANISOTROPIC for MAG, MIN and MIP filters. I am a newbie in Direct3D and I don't know any other method to improve texture mapping quality : maybe an antialias effect ? how to implement it under Direct3D ?

I work in Microelectronics domain so I know very well why texture sizes are limited to power of 2 but sometimes it's irritating [smile]

Amarhys

all modern gpus support non power of two sized textures. so there's really not much reason to use power of two sizes...

Quote:Original post by Evil Steve

Quote:Original post by Scoob Droolins
watch out, there are plenty of video cards out there that cannot handle a a 4096x4096 texture.

All ATi cards only support up to 2048x2048 texture resolution in fact. At least all the ATi cards listed in the DirectX caps spreadsheet (In the DX SDK, up to X850) only do 2048x2048.

The last generation (that one that support Shader Model 3) supports 4096*4096 as this is part of the Shader Model 3 definition.

Quote:Original post by kusma
all modern gpus support non power of two sized textures. so there's really not much reason to use power of two sizes...

The non power of two texture support is still limited on a wide range of GPUs.

Quote:Original post by Demirug
The non power of two texture support is still limited on a wide range of GPUs.

Yes, but thats mostly with texture coordinate wrapping and such, not really a problem when mapping a cube.