does the 'restrict textures to 512px- reduce visual quality?

[Jackson Redstar]

and does it lower VRAM usage? I have tried it both on and off and it is hard to tell if if it does lower visual quality but it does 'seem' to lower VRAM usage. I don't really know what is going on to restrict the texture sizes so i really don't know what overall effect it has. I have a video card now with 16g VRAM - I usually had this checked on with my older card but I was doing an event with about 45 in attendance Saturday with it off and dedicated VRAM usage hit about 12-13 gig so it made me start to wonder what goes on with this checked on

[gwynchisholm]

I remember doing a bunch with this in a thread before. It does but very little, like under 500mb of difference at best. It would matter more on low vram cards. 
Shadows impact vram the most heavily.

[Aishagain]

I tried this in FS (Release 7.1.9) and the main change I noticed was that I lost any "Blinn-phong" specular "texture" in objects, which I found too high a price to pay for a few more FPS and at the time it did nothing to reduce texture thrashing.  I since have realised that the thrashing was due to a bug in the rendering pipeline which FS fixed quite rapidly in their recent run of Alpha and Beta viewers, so I don't see that it has any value for me at least (6GB VRAM via a GTX 1660Ti GPU).

Edited August 13 by Aishagain

[Wulfie Reanimator]

On 8/12/2024 at 9:14 PM, Jackson Redstar said:

I have tried it both on and off and it is hard to tell if if it does lower visual quality but it does 'seem' to lower VRAM usage. I don't really know what is going on to restrict the texture sizes so i really don't know what overall effect it has.

Of course it reduces visual quality - you can't get a high resolution image from a low resolution image. How noticable the difference is will of course depend a lot on the type of texture you're looking at. Artifacts from downscaling don't necessarily show up if the color data is "lucky" and there may not be fine details that would be affected at half-scale from 1024.

On 8/12/2024 at 9:49 PM, gwynchisholm said:

I remember doing a bunch with this in a thread before. It does but very little, like under 500mb of difference at best. It would matter more on low vram cards. 
Shadows impact vram the most heavily.

"500 MB" is also super subjective to the scene. The more high resolution textures there are, the more savings.

[Extrude Ragu]

Depends on the scene and how many unique large textures there  are.

a 512px image is 1/4 the size of a 1024, so it would not surprise me if it more than halves vram usage. I'm not sure if it's smart enough to change the textures it has already downloaded though or if it requires a cache clear.

Edited August 15 by Extrude Ragu

[Wulfie Reanimator]

2 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

I'm not sure if it's smart enough to change the textures it has already downloaded though or if it requires a cache clear.

It doesn't require a cache clear, and cached textures will be displayed in 512 resolution too.

[Jackson Redstar]

24 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

It doesn't require a cache clear, and cached textures will be displayed in 512 resolution too.

so that sounds like then it sill downloads the full image size, just displays it as the smaller size, Si it wouldn't affect VRAM usage it seems it just might have a small effect on visual appearence

[Frionil Fang]

31 minutes ago, Jackson Redstar said:

so that sounds like then it sill downloads the full image size, just displays it as the smaller size, Si it wouldn't affect VRAM usage it seems it just might have a small effect on visual appearence

I did a small very crude and not terribly well controlled test using the texture debug console (control-shift-3), but limiting texture resolution does have an effect.

My test scene had 4 objects with two 1024x1024 and two 2048x2048 textures, all unique since the same texture isn't loaded multiple times. With texture max resolution limited to 1024, the memory use by the objects dropped from 35 MB (roughly the 2x 16 MB + 2x 4MB as expected) to 14 MB (roughly the 4x 4 MB as expected), and with resolution limited to 512 the memory use was 8 MB (more than the 4x 1 MB expected, but still considerably less than 14 MB total). The discrepancies are probably because as I said, it wasn't a terribly well controlled scene and there's things like cloud textures, ground textures, etc. in memory too muddling up the baseline that I tried to account for.

Also oh boy 2048 looks *bad* when limiting to 512 resolution, it just loads the partial decode at 512x size as opposed to an actual 512x texture and it's... not great.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

55 minutes ago, Frionil Fang said:

Also oh boy 2048 looks *bad* when limiting to 512 resolution, it just loads the partial decode at 512x size as opposed to an actual 512x texture and it's... not great.

For this reason, LL is considering doing the downscaling on the GPU instead of only requesting the partial texture. (Though obviously this has its own downsides.)

Edited August 15 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Jackson Redstar]

whatever the case is I am realizing that now, and especially  with 2048 textures coming, it does appear 16 g of VRAM will be base min to run SL 'comfortably' And that is today - in a few years time I can see 24g of VRAM being the minumum

Edited August 15 by Jackson Redstar

[AmeliaJ08]

2 hours ago, Jackson Redstar said:

whatever the case is I am realizing that now, and especially  with 2048 textures coming, it does appear 16 g of VRAM will be base min to run SL 'comfortably' And that is today - in a few years time I can see 24g of VRAM being the minumum

Seems unrealistic, if there's a genuine need for more than 8GB it would only be because people have their settings cranked too high (mainly Max # of non-imposter avatars and draw distance). If those two are set to reasonable values than 2048 shouldn't be a problem.

Yeah you won't be able to render 50+ avatars on screen all at once in full detail without huge VRAM but most people aren't doing that. Viewers might get a bit less jank about how they reduce the impact of avatars, especially those in the foreground. There's more stuff that could be done that could well keep VRAM usage under control.

Targeting 8GB would be wise for the next 2-3 years (Nvidia's low-mid range card comes with 8GB still today in 2024 and a lot of people use 6-8GB VRAM laptops) and then targeting for 12GB thereafter would seem reasonable.