Reducing textures size, more lag...

Questions & Answers
1

Hi guys,

Our game is almost finished and we noticed that our game is using about 75mo in ram. So we decided to reduce texture size only on device with 512mo of ram. Unfortunately, reducing texture size is adding a lot of lags and we don’t understand why. Our game is for ios and android, same issue on both! Could it be the shaders? We also reduced textures with alpha if it can help.

Thanks in advance,
David

Using: unity basic + ios, android

[EDIT]

Reducing :
1 map 2048x2048 RGB 24bit to 1024x1024 RGB 24bit

1 map 1024x1024 RGBA 32 bit to 512x512 RGBA 32 bit

1 map 512x512 RGBA 16 bit to 256x256 RGBA 16 bit

1 map 256x256 RGBA 16 bit to 128x128 RGBA 16 bit

We also reduced 1 map 1024x1024 RGBA PVRTC 4 bits to 512x512 RGBA PVRTC 4 bits (Automatic compressed) and 1 map 2048x2048 RGBA PVRTC 4 bits to 1024x1024 RGBA PVRTC 4 bits (Automatic compressed) but when we noticed more lag, we tested it back without reducing those maps.

2

It might possibly be including different texture resolutions for different maps in the same shader, as sometimes depending on the way the shader is written it needs to perform a Get/Set calculation twice as often (which in forward or deferred based lighting can make a big difference). But that is usually more true of custom shaders, not Unity’s inbuilt stuff.

Another possibility is atlasing, if you are using that. I have heard with UDK that it prefers square textures in power2 numbers. Atlases whilst saving performance in some areas can affect it negatively in others. Dunno about in Unity though.

my final guess would be if in reducing the sizes of the files, they have been saved with the layer information as well as just the raw image data. Though this shouldn’t impact performace in the way you seem to be suggesting is happening.

All blind guesses though. Let us know when you find out the culprit. :slight_smile: