Does enabling Read/Write on a texture double its memory usage?

Questions & Answers
1

Greetings,

I remember reading a while back somewhere on the forums that enabling read/write permissions on textures (to be able to perform GetPixels etc) will double its memory usage at runtime. Is this true? To me it doesn’t make sense, the texture memory is there, why would being able to read the buffer require double the size?

Thanks

2

The reason why it doubles the memory usage is that you need to keep two copies of the texture. One for the GPU (which you can’t access directly without a performance penalty) and one for the CPU stored in local memory. IIRC, you can still access the texture without read/write enabled.