Textures vs. Lag

Then I believe we are on the same page. I do not purposely use high resolution textures on anything I make.....I use what I believe is adequate for the detail I want to be shown.

It just brings up my ire a little because I do occassionally use 1024 x 1024 textures where I believe detail is important. And because of that people like me get a bad rap.........we are selfish or something. I am not..........I do care if my textures cause undue problems. But what is "undue"? Someone with a low end computer has problems but someone with a reasonable computer does not? I'll go with the reasonable computer over the low end budget model anyday..............those low end users are not likely to appreciate anything I make anyway.

But, if you are selling something I believe you need to use a texture that delivers as much detail as possible to present your product as best you can......if that means a 1024 texture then so be it.

It's not at all unusual for me to go to a store with a big grid of pictures of products, many of which stay gray longer than my patience lasts. So I leave.

this simply isn't true.have you actually measured this with a stopwatch, or are you just stating an assumption? The hardware in the client is very relevant to total thruput of an internet connection. Otherwise products like the KillerNIC wouldn't exist. And Intel would not have advertised the P4 as "makes the internet faster". Truth is, there *are* special instructions in the P4 which optimize the transfer of data from net buffers to system ram. P3's and many AMD's don't have that. So a P3 is slower than a P4 all other things equal. But usually there are other factors too. For one the fastest P3 is 1.4GHz and the slowest P4 1.5GHz. Info does not travel from your cable modem directly to your monitor. The CPU speed matters. The amount of system RAM matters. Getting stuff in and out of a cache which is on an ATA66 hard drive will be much slower than a SATA300. This is part of the equation. Even the GFX card affects network speed (and vice versa). If the bus is waiting on a gfx card with DDR2 ram on it to finish transferring textures from ram before it can fetch the next one from the cache, a gfx card with DDR3 ram will "download faster". SL taxes all of the hardware components to the max and beyond. All limiting factors contribute to the overall "lag" in BOTH rez time and fps.

But the up shot, as already mentioned repeatedly, is that being wise about textures, universally helps all aspects.

There I agree with you 100%. I often use the word "frugal". Frugal doesn't say "never use saffron", it says "use saffron sparingly only in the dishes that require it". Another often overlooked issue is making 32bit images unnecessarily. Product vendor images never need an alpha, do they? Particularly for those more concerned with the fps side. I also hate this "square" business but that's a SL quirk. A 1024x768x24 would seem to me the ideal candidate for vendor pics given most are presented in familiar landscape mode, not squares. *shrug*

Another thing that needs to be stressed again:

The server at Linden Labs on which the simulator program controlling the region runs has to send the texture information to the clients in the region. Once each texture is sent, it can be cached on the user's system, of course, but it must be sent to each user. If you are expecting to have a large number of people entering your area, then you should realize that having a lot of different textures (one texture on multiple objects is not a problem) means that the server will be spending a lot of processing power and bandwidth sending this information to the agents in the sim when they enter.

This can cause SERVER-SIDE lag. Server-side lag affects everyone, even if you have a 16-core processor and quad-SLi rig with 12 gigs of RAM, you will experience this lag, an NO, it will NOT be less laggy for you! Sorry if I sound terse, but I get really tired of people going "well, I have a really fast machine, so I don't feel any lag at all right now, maybe you just need a new computer" when the sim time dilation is 0.25 (not that textures would be likely to cause a TD like that under most normal situations).

I'm really sorry you are tired of "well, I have a really fast machine..........you just need a new computer". I know and understand the difference in server side and client side lag. I can control the client side lag on my machine........but can do nothing about server side. I do not have an overly fast machine but it is a couple steps above that $399 E-Machine. I experience very little client side lag and when I do I either adjust my settings to lessen it or I live with it. And when I get the server side lag (such as entering a busy sim or texture heavy shop) I know I have to wait for stuff to rezz, deal with delays in walking, panning around........there's nothing I can do to fix it so why whine about?

It seems every time this subject comes up a gang of people jump on the "everyone needs to stop making lag enducing textures or scripts or flexis, or sculpties". What I hear is make all your textures at 24 bit and not larger than 128 x 128. Never use 32 bit textures, never wear flexi hair or skirts, trash all your blingy stuff, remove your huds and AO's, etc etc etc. If we all did that, just think of the lag we would eliminate........and think of the bland, flat world we would have.

If you do not need a large texture or a texture with an alpha channel then don't use it.....that is common sense. But, if you do need those things then I think you should feel free (and not feel any guilt either) to use them. You said all texture vendors should be 24 bit........because no vender ever needs transparency. I can think of several occassions where a 32 bit texture is quite correct to use.

If your machine is struggling with textures (I'm not talking about server sdie lag) then it's on you to adjust. If you cannot adjust your settings to make SL run in an acceptable way for you then it might be time to look at a better computer.......or you can live with it. But do ask everyone else to make the adjustments in their creations to compensate for your shortcomings. That's all I"m saying.......that's all I've been saying.

I will continue to use my occassional 1024, 32 bit textures where I think I need them. When LL puts a rule or TOS stopping what I do, then I will quit. Not because someone on a minimally spec'ed computer is having problems with client side lag.

This argument sounds so much like the ARC debates..........LOL.

I don't really think there've been posts on this thread suggesting that larger or more numerous textures should be banned or anything. But the OP specifically asked about what could be done with textures to minimize lag, and there absolutely are steps that can be taken that make a build easier to download and rez, whether for fast machines or slow, whether the sim is empty or crowded. Describing how all that works--answering the question--seems what most of the posts are about here. Gee, unless I'm really losing it, I don't think textures are limited to squares. They are (or at least have been) limited to powers of two on both X and Y, but I could swear I've uploaded 512x256 images before. Granted, that aspect ratio is pretty far from the golden section, but sometimes it's still a win.

Exactly, and this is the point of my thread.

I don't care if someone has a $50 graphic card, or a $2000 graphic card. I want it to load fast, and I want it to load NOW.

I didn't read everything as some seemed a tad too argumentative to me, but I've gotten my answer

I've used about 5-6 different textures total in the floor, walls, furniture, etc etc and you really couldn't tell unless you actually looked at it. It's still only the first floor but it looks so snazzy!

Thank you all for your replies. =)

I dont know if this is common knowledge or not, but one of the things ive learned to do is to make my prims the "blank" texture and then only actually use a "texture" on the sides where it is necessary. So for a sign...I will only "texture" the side facing out...the rest of the sign gets a coordinating color tint only. I was taught that squished sides of prims with a squished textures actually cause some delay in rezzing of the item into view for some people and also can cause lag. It certainly seems to help on my sims. Ive gone in and blanked out the inside of all kinds of things that ive discovered were made and then covered over by another prim etc.

Just my two cents...

Yeah, I've done that too Or made the prim the color/texture that's the darkest of what I'll be using and "Select Texture" if I need another side a different texture/color. Looks loads better, too.

I hadn't heard about that, but I blank the textures on hidden sides, too, for a different reason: retexturing. Everybody always has the blank texture, but if there's a different custom texture on those hidden sides, that texture will get downloaded, competing with whatever texture I've applied to the faces that show.

Somewhere in inventory I have a castle build that takes forever to rez because I used multiple generations of textures buried in different hidden faces of the prims. I always meant to rebuild it without the hidden textures but, well, you know: castles are such ephemeral things.

That would be my understanding to. Far as I can tell, the little preview window is the only thing which is a fixed square. So yeah a texture will appear "stretched funny" there, but that is irrelevant. It's gonna get sretched to the object and rendered in world completely differently. *shrug*

this is a very very good practice, please continue. It does not affect download time any, but does give my low-end graphics card 1/6th as much stuff to worry about. thank you.