How much of 2D can I push

Unity Engine
1

Hi! I’m evaluating game concept in my head, mix of 2D and 3D. I wonder…

Let’s say, I have forest scene. And make it use pre-rendered tree sprites. And every tree will have, like 60 animation frames. Now, if game is 1280x720, every tree has to be quite large, at least 512x512 pixels.

If I put around 50 tress on screen at a time, will it be too much for GPU to handle? As I understand, in terms of 3D engine, every 2D sprite is stored at GPU memory. So having lots of large sprites, animating them every frame - is a overkill.

Is there some elegant solution to this, or that is a limitation? Maybe some atlas mapping and clever instancing might allow to place lots of animated 2D sprites on the screen at the same time?

2

How much you can push depends on your hardware.

No…100 sprites that use the same texture won’t take any more memory than 1 sprite. (Well, technically you’d be storing data for 400 vertices instead of 4, but that’s essentially trivial.) However, 60 animation frames of 512x512 each is quite a lot.

–Eric