How to copy data to Texture2DArray as fast as possible

[joshuacwilde]

Right now, I have a use case where I stream in textures using Unity’s texture streaming API, then use Graphics.CopyTexture() to copy those into a Texture2DArray. What I would rather do is just store the textures as raw data so then at runtime, I can pull only the mip I need (rather than the whole texture as Unity does) from disk, then copy that into a Texture2DArray, ideally without having to create an intermediate texture to do the copying (to avoid double copying data). Any thoughts?

[jbooth1]

@joshuacwilde

Right now, I have a use case where I stream in textures using Unity’s texture streaming API, then use Graphics.CopyTexture() to copy those into a Texture2DArray. What I would rather do is just store the textures as raw data so then at runtime, I can pull only the mip I need (rather than the whole texture as Unity does) from disk, then copy that into a Texture2DArray, ideally without having to create an intermediate texture to do the copying (to avoid double copying data). Any thoughts?

Store them as bytes, one file per mip, already compressed in the format you need. Then use the Texture2D API to load them, and copy them in via Graphics.CopyTexture (which has an option for mip source/target) mip by mip.