How does masterTextureLimit affect asset load?

I’m trying to load a scene with a lot of large textures. All textures are made for iPad 3rd generation, so most of them are 2048x2048. I also want the game to run on iPad 1, and are therefore using masterTextureLimit to half the texture size and hereby reduce the memory usage. All this is working fine.

But why are the load time unaffected whether masterTextureLimit is 0, 1 or 2? I’m able to see the effect of changing masterTextureLimit at the textures quality, however the load time always stays the same.

Doesn’t masterTextureLimit prevent a scene from loading the full texture, or am I missing something?

masterTextureLimit will cause a lower resolution texture to be picked from your chosen texture file if mipmaps are enabled. However, at least on mobile devices, the whole texture (full resolution and scaled down mipmap versions) are fully loaded into memory no matter what masterTextureLimit is set to.

Yu could actually reduce load time and memory usage by not using Mipmaps at all and not bothering with masterTextureLimit. If you need high resolution textures on retina devices, but memory limits are a problem on lower end devices, then you should bundle multiple resolution images with your app and load the correct resolution texture based on the device your app is running on.