The Power of Two and The GPU

Scavenger

I'm taking a course on Unity basics, and something mentioned was that it's best to have your screen size be in powers of 2, to take advantage of features in the GPU...effenciees I assume.. it was pretty basic information....

My question is..would that apply to GPU ussage here..like in iRay?  I've been using picture ratios of 11:17 and the usual resolution of 3200 x 2071, with the idea of printing on Tabloid Size paper.

Is the ratio and sizes I'm choosing working against the performance of my computer?

larsmidnatt

Power of two for texture sizes yes. For mipmapping and performance. So stick to 2,4,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048,4096,8192 dimensions for textures. But that is for games, doesn't matter as much elsewhere.

That is how power of 2 is used. I wouldn't worry about it for screen sizes. Screen sizes have never been power of 2. Ever.

And for renders, render to the resolution you want to print. Maybe a tad more(maybe small padding to support different print aspect ratios), but the higher the resolution the slower the render, regardless of power of 2 or not :) A power of 2 render would be 4096x2048 and that isn't going to be faster to render than a 3200x2071 image.

 

larsmidnatt

Oh and it's worth noting, Unity is good about non power of 2 textures. Unlike some game engines that will give you warnings/errors when using non-power of 2 textures, Unity actually fixes that for you. Still a good idea to do this yourself though. But you won't break anything.

mjc1016

3Delight prrefers textures in power of two also, because the native tdl format (that's what the optimizing images is doing, converting to tdl) is just a series of mipmapped tifs...if they are already  'squared' it is just one less thing for tdlmake to do and makes it slightly faster.