Texture Resolution power of two?

Question

I'm not an expert so I'm genuinely asking here. I've heard that to keep performance good, textures generally need to be a power of 2 (2 4 8 16 32 64 128 etc) else the rendering can slow down or mip mapping doesn't work etc.

Would using a resolution of 720x720 cause these problems? My intuition tells me for mobile I should go with 256x256 or 512x512.

I'm guessing 720x720 didn't cause any trouble for you but I'm interested to hear your opinion on the matter.

Answer 1 · 2021-03-01T17:57:30Z

Jonathan Lampel replied March 1, 2021 5:57pm

Hey, great question! Short answer: performance is slightly better with power of 2 textures but other sizes like 720p won't cause you any real problems for a project like this.

This Stack Exchange thread has some great answers: Why are textures always square powers of two? What if they aren't? - Game Development Stack Exchange

The power of 2 rule is still great advice and something I think I will stick to it more in the future, but when I was making this course I felt that 512 was not quite enough pixels to work with and 1024 was way too many so I settled for something in between that's still fairly standard.

Answer 2 · 2021-03-02T02:21:25Z

i

replied March 2, 2021 2:21am

Ok, that's a satisfying answer. I think another big lesson that you're reinforcing here is that standards are baselines but to go beyond them and not have everything explode is where real professionals work.