Instead of high res texture packs what about optimized ones?

[hungry man]

Couldn't you lessen the load of a game by running all of the textures through an image optimizer? You'd have the same quality textures but the files would all be smaller. I know that using high res textures slows things down so wouldn't the opposite speed things up?

[parasite64]

Well, the way I see it, dolphin is more CPU restricted then GPU restricted. I don't really think altering the textures is going to have a massive improvement on speed. Since the textures are (i think this is how it works), are processed by the GPU, then there's not really going to be that much of an increase/decrease as I'd assume alot of people have decent machines, with decent graphics card; it's just that Dolphin is so CPU intensive, but that's just the way I see it

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:Since the textures are (i think this is how it works), are processed by the GPU, then there's not really going to be that much of an increase/decrease as I'd assume alot of people have decent machines, with decent graphics card; it's just that Dolphin is so CPU intensive, but that's just the way I see it

That's not how it works at all. Textures are DECODED before they can be used. Dolphin currently has three different sets of texture decoders. One written in C (sse optimized) which will run on the cpu (this is the default unless the user specifies otherwise), one using openCL (runs on the gpu), and one using openMP (runs on the cpu, multi-threaded). In most situations the C texture decoders are the fastest.

Quote:Couldn't you lessen the load of a game by running all of the textures through an image optimizer? You'd have the same quality textures but the files would all be smaller. I know that using high res textures slows things down so wouldn't the opposite speed things up?

No. That makes no sense. High resolution textures take forever to decode because they have such a high number of pixels.

[MayImilae]

Quote:No. That makes no sense. High resolution textures take forever to decode because they have such a high number of pixels.

What if the hi-res texture files are in a format the video card can read natively? Such as DDS?

[NaturalViolence]

I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way. Hi-res textures are decoded as if they were native game textures, essentially "replacing" them.

[linkinworm]

just get a better pc id say

[neobrain]

(04-03-2011, 02:51 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way. Hi-res textures are decoded as if they were native game textures, essentially "replacing" them.

Actually, hires textures are directly loaded from png/bmp/tga/dds/jpg files and thus no decoding step is needed (apart from the file decoding obviously, which is negligible for at least uncompressed bmp files).

[NaturalViolence]

I was hoping you would find this thread. Dolphin caches decoded textures right?

[neobrain]

Erm... that as well, although it is totally unrelated to hires textures..

Fwiw, the hires texture loading feature could be used just as well to use lowres textures instead, there's just no lowres texture packs out there