[sldev] Reformatting Textures for the cache

[John Hurliman]

Morse Dillon wrote:
> Jason Giglio wrote:
>> One minor clarification, I believe all existing 2048 texture assets 
>> have been batch-jobbed down to 1024 by Linden Lab.  I seem to 
>> remember something in a blog post about that, or a changelog. 
>
> I remember this as a blog post, and I have to say that it was somewhat 
> to my chagrin since there are some (albiet few) places where high-res 
> textures are very appropriate.  I was amidst putting together a 
> gallery of classic impressionist works when this change went down, and 
> in such an environment it was 'ok' to wait for these textures to rez 
> so the user could examine them in fine detail.  I personally harbor 
> this little tiny hope that the 2048 texture will make a return, 
> especially as the average amount of video memory increases. 

I've been saying for a while that SL should do away with 1024 textures 
as well and make 512x512 the upper limit unless they plan on upping the 
minimum system requirements. Just a couple 1024x1024 textures will have 
a 64MB graphics card switching to AGP texturing (using system memory to 
store textures), clog the AGP bus and drop you from 7fps to less than 1. 
If you want to provide high quality photo portraits to people, give them 
a web link. If you want to texture 3D objects in a real-time online 
world, keep your minimum system specs in mind. I haven't looked at that 
part of the rendering pipeline yet but in the best case scenario SL is 
taking your video memory size in to account and possibly downscaling the 
images.

John Hurliman