Texture Load Times verses Texture Size

I've been texturing a complicated build which includes several Mega and Sculpty Prims with touchy tiling texturing. So, I have had to make some compound textures (my terminology, please tell me if there is already a "term of art" for slicing a huge texture 1536x512 into 3 512x512's), to be spread between 3 horizontally adjacent prim.

The question: From the Visitors' standpoint, is it a faster load to have one 1536x512 texture applied to the three prims (offset appropriately); or, three seperate 512x512 texture slices one apply to each of the three prims?

Thanks in advance.

hmmm, I'm no expert Phat, but I think the single texture is the way to go. 3 separate textures = 3 separate loads, whereas the single texture just gets loaded the once, despite different portions being visible.


I think Ceera Murakami (and others, but she is the only one I can remember right now lol) posted a better explanation on this recently - try a quick search using her name

Inc

It's an interesting question from a theoretical perspective and, yes, Ceera answered it recently in this forum. From a practical standpoint, however, the answer is simple. You have to use three textures. Unless something has changed, the largest dimension that SL will let you upload is 1024 pixels. If you try to upload a larger image, it will be downsized automatically so that its largest dimension is 1024.

It's not just that 1536 is too big, as Rolig said. It's also not a power of two. All textures must be measurable in powers of two in both dimensions. If one is not, it will be resized at the time of upload, and the results aren't always pretty.