It would mean slower loading perhaps but there’s a balance to be struck there. Besides, game being fun has nothing to do with game being high fidelity or huge hard disk space.
Not just slower loading. Less available performance in game.
Every time it needs to load a texture it’s uncompressing it on the fly…. That’s going to take away from CPU and RAM (both the compressed and uncompressed versions will be in RAM).
It is loading them dynamically in the background constantly. If those textures are compressed, it’s doing work to load the compressed version into memory, CPU is reading it out of memory, decompressing it and putting it back in memory, then moving it to the GPU.
It will take 1.5x (assuming 50% reduction in the compressed copy, probably would be worse) the RAM plus the CPU overhead depending on compression algorithm.
That is happening while you’re playing.
Unless at load it is decompressing and storing the decompressed textures on your disk, in which case you need 1.5x (or more) of the original storage to play the game and compressing them in the first place is worse if the thing you’re optimizing for is game size on disk (which is what this thread is complaining about).
I don’t know how much power you think it takes to load and render textures on a model, but I can assure you that as long as you are not running on a potatoe programmed by monkeys slamming a football into a keyboard, it will not significantly impact performance once loaded.
It would mean slower loading perhaps but there’s a balance to be struck there. Besides, game being fun has nothing to do with game being high fidelity or huge hard disk space.
Not just slower loading. Less available performance in game.
Every time it needs to load a texture it’s uncompressing it on the fly…. That’s going to take away from CPU and RAM (both the compressed and uncompressed versions will be in RAM).
It’s not going to be less performance in the game. Once uploaded to GPU texture is ready to be used. Just the loading part would be slower.
It is loading them dynamically in the background constantly. If those textures are compressed, it’s doing work to load the compressed version into memory, CPU is reading it out of memory, decompressing it and putting it back in memory, then moving it to the GPU.
It will take 1.5x (assuming 50% reduction in the compressed copy, probably would be worse) the RAM plus the CPU overhead depending on compression algorithm.
That is happening while you’re playing.
Unless at load it is decompressing and storing the decompressed textures on your disk, in which case you need 1.5x (or more) of the original storage to play the game and compressing them in the first place is worse if the thing you’re optimizing for is game size on disk (which is what this thread is complaining about).
That’s only true if the GPU can fit all of the textures for the whole game in its VRAM, and doesn’t need to store anything else.
What do you think the chances of that are?
It’s not a chance based thing. But sure, sometimes keeping texture in memory is fine.
I don’t know how much power you think it takes to load and render textures on a model, but I can assure you that as long as you are not running on a potatoe programmed by monkeys slamming a football into a keyboard, it will not significantly impact performance once loaded.