Larger texture vs tiling (found half of the answer

[unregistered]

Made 5120^3 room with nothing, just a zone light and a 256 x 256 texture. I get a huge fps hit, doesn't go higher than 35fps.

If I replace that 256 texture with some random 2048 x 2048 texture I get stable 85fps.

Don't know if that's a GPU bottleneck or the render itself. Maybe that has some relationship with the scaling problems of s3tc textures? I mean, with s3tc what you see is a high resolution tiling, the texture repeats as usual, but with higher detail. Imagine a large outdoor terrain with a large texture, large enough to cover it with no repetition, if I texture it with a 256 x 256 texture and no scaling, I'll see it repeating many times over, enable s3tc and what I'd see the same number of texture repetitions, just at higher detail.

[[]KAOS[]Casey]

wow what the hell..

With unreal the majority of the rendering is actually done on CPU time.. which is probably why the larger texture would render faster being tiled. But i have no real proof to back up the tiling part.

[unregistered]

with s3tc disabled, opengl or d3d never display textures with a resolution higher than 256 x 256, is that the render itself that won't display uncompressed high res or videocards theirselves won't display large textures if not compressed?

Found that with s3tc enabled, high res textures are displayed with software compression, unless they are already s3tc compressed, then hardware support makes it a lot faster.