Texture force power-of-two, or add "whitespace" to original texture? Which is better?

Unity Engine
1

A lot of textures I have are not power of two. It is recommended to use power of two.
On the texture import settings, I choose to nearest power-of-two. And when I run the game, or view the scene, I don’t notice any visual difference whatsoever between leaving it as-is or forcing a power of two.

But I wonder if it is a better approach to manually update the texture to add unused padding to make the texture a power of two, rather than forcing a power-of-two in Unity. For example:

Before: 500 x 500 size
2372031--161170--before.jpg

after “whitespace” 512 x 512 size:

2372031--161171--after.jpg
2372031--161171--after.jpg512×512 82.3 KB

Does anyone know whether it is a better approach to manually update the texture to make it a power-of-two, rather than choosing a non-power-of-two setting in the texture import settings?

Thanks
j

2

White space is only the right answer if you need a texture to be exactly pixel perfect (often for UI), otherwise adding white space means you loose the ability to cheaply tile the texture and you’re going to have guaranteed edges at the seams. Just let Unity covert them to power of two.

1 Like
3

Ok. I completely forgot about the tiling.

4

The reason of use power-of-two texture is GPU compression texture only support this case of texture size.

1 Like