Texture Size on Baked Creations?

I'm about to start work on a complete office-room build, including fully baked textures and so on, and have a question regarding the textures. Normally, I use 512x512 pixel textures for just about everything, but I'm unsure if that's good for things like no-repeat floors and walls.

My reasoning is that for a 'normal' room size in SL, it takes a repeating 512 texture to look generally good. But, for a non-repeating texture, it can become grainy, or a bit pixellated when used on an entire wall, or floor, or similar.

So, my question is, would it be better to:

Use single baked textures in 1024x1024 size (Or 1024x512, etc, for walls),

or

Use separate shadow/highlight prims and continue with the repeating textures for the base wall?

I know that the separate shadows will be more prim-intensive, but I'm asking more about the resources used. Would it be less laggy/download intensive to use, say, one 1024x1024 texture, or 3/4 512x512 textures for the same effect?

Yes I have thought about this also, with sculpties we can replicate the main prim types pretty easily, for example a SL prim cube could have 6 unique textures all at 512.

A baked cube would have one texture at 1024, gaining 2 512 size texture spaces making me think its more efficient. To go up to 2048 size for the sculptie baked texture would have equivalent of 16 512px textures.

The way I see it in a situation where you have 16 or more main faces on a larger sculpted object it would be less texture weight than the equivalent in prims even at 2048 px.

The other advantage is that alpha overlaid textures take up alot of resources (16 more bits?) for faking shadows which is avoided by baking the shadows in.

This is largely speculation with some observation inworld on my part, please let us know how it goes

-w