best tile size for terrain?

when using textures from online they often look terrible unless terrain tile size is 1x1.

From what i understand (and please correct me if needed)

a smaller terrain tile size is going to generate ALOT of calls to the gfx card to render each tile. (hence why i don’t want to simply leave it at 1x1 size and call it good)

a tile size too large will result in less calls but occupy too much memory space. (though i’m still not sure outside of being a power of two a good size, and i’ve googled quite abit looking for an answer, 16x16, 32x32?)

if that is correct then basically can I not take a terrain that looks good in 1x1, tile it myself into to a 16x16 piece, and then save that as a new tile that should hopefully look good now as a 16x16 tile maintaining the high detail while not being a tiny tile?

any guidance, even a web link indicating perhaps roughly how much memory a tile at different sizes takes up or standard sizes or anything really would be much appreciated.

There are maybe 3 sizes:

o TerrainInspector->Paint->EditTextures->Edit->TileSize controls how “stretched” the textures you paint look. 1x1 is going to look good when you are very close, but has obvious tiling as you pull back and be a flat blur from high up.

The default setting of 15x15 looks OK for a camera about 2-4 meters from the ground. Is that really blurry for you? If only 1x1 looks good, you must be very, very close to the ground. You can also use fractions (1.2 x 1.2)

That tile size is only a multiplier in the graphics card, for when it looks up the pixel, so changing it has no effect on speed. Graphics cards love to wrap-around textures with various lengths. Pick whatever looks good. Powers of two aren’t special for this number. Feel free to reuse the same texture, with a different tile size, blended with itself.

o The heightMap resolution is the size of the “tiles” you see in WireFrame mode. It affects how graceful the curves in hills will be. Each of those corners is stored and processed during each call, so having more does slow things down. This likes powers of two, since a speed-up is to cut the count in half for far away.

o The ControlTextureResolution is the size of the “brushSquare” tiles, when you paint terrain.
Increasing this will increase the amount of memory (it’s stored as a big texture over the whole ground, like a shadow map, but with grass/dirt/snow instead of shadow.) If you have only one texture, this won’t appear to do anything. Since it is a texture, it should be a power of two (graphics cards can read from those faster.)

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