What's better? Having several texture files or cropping sections of a single one?

[juanxer]

While building a ship with lots of hull signage, I was wondering how EIAS deals with texture files, what the most efficient way of doing it would be, render speed-wise:

1- The usual: lots of independent texture files.

2- Putting lots of elements into a single texture file, then doing each texture mapping entry by cropping to delimit the relevant element area of that single file (which in this particular case would make things like changing signage fonts in a single master texture .PSD file quite easier that dealing with a lot of different files).

Does Camera work faster if most texture mapping entries refer to a few common texture files instead of each being a different one, via some caching strategy? Would cropping a large file be less efficient that dealing with several small ones?

[Igors]

Hi, Juanxer

Does Camera work faster if most texture mapping entries refer to a few common texture files instead of each being a different one, via some caching strategy? Would cropping a large file be less efficient that dealing with several small ones?

Any render engine (count Camera) prefers to use more memory to allocate each map “directly” (i.e. as unpacked array) cause an operation “get map’s pixel” is at least 10 times more often than, say, “get facet/vertex”. Thus a “multi-map” would eat a lot of your time to prepare it but without real speed up.

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