Does displaying a small part of a large texture on a prim consume more resources that using a small texture?

[Jennifer Boyle]

I wanted to make some transparent signs with numbers. It occurred to me that I could put all the numbers on one 1024 x 1024 texture and display a small part of it on each sign instead of uploading a separate texture each sign. However, I wondered if displaying parts of a larger texture consumes more resources from the server or viewer than using smaller textures. Or maybe less because only one texture is involved? Here's the texture I used:

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

It's a method I use quite a lot, because it's more efficient in term of upload costs and display usage to have a single texture rather than 16 smaller ones.

Let's assume you want to make a visible counter with your texture to display numbers from 0 to 99. That's two faces, and 10 individual digits.

One 1024x1024 subdivides into 16 areas of 256x256

10 individual 256x256 textures don't require quite so much space in terms of bytes, but they require more resoruces on the server to store, entries, indexes, perms, uuids, etc.

In terms of usage, the real gains come with the effecitve preloading you get by using a single large texture with varying offsets , the unseen digits are already loaded and when you flip from a 1 to a 2 on a face, there is no need to load a new texture, it's not just cached on disk, but already in the GPU.

The cinema slideshows I used had four 512x5112 screens on a 1024x1024 texture and worked very wel, the individual sections were perfectly readable and didn't blur hen zoomed into.

[Quistess Alpha]

As far as I know one large texture is more efficient than many smaller ones. In my experience it's a bit overkill to use anything larger than 512 by 512, though, and if you make the texture white over transparent you can easily re-tint the face to change the color of the numbers or letters.

 

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

16 minutes ago, Quistess Alpha said:

In my experience it's a bit overkill to use anything larger than 512 by 512

This does depend on the size of the surface to be textured and how much of the viewer screen it is likely to spread out over. For a clock ace using the 16 subdivisions you'd be putting 128x128 textures on the surface, which should be adequate since only a ery strange person is going to zoom in until the screen shows nothing but a pair of slowly changing digits. For a picture or cinema screen or notice board with writing on it, you will need a bigger texture since it is likely to be zoomed in until it's taking up quite a few pixels. I found the four subdivisions of a 1024x1024 still looked clear when I zoomed the screen so that the 512x512 was taking up probably 800x800 pixels. A smaller sized texture gave fuzzy edges to many of the lines and details.

I was testing on a 1980x1080 HDMI TV and a 1280x1024 mnitor. I have no idea what people with these 4K monitors see.

[ChinRey]

I don't really have much to add to the three excellent replies already here but a texture like this is called a texture atlas.