Rendering speed effect of hi-res textures on all sides of "pictures"

I was in a big store with a great many boxes shaped to serve as pictures of products for sale.

This particular store is always full of gray textures on my system.

I decided to use the Selected Texture Info option to see what resolution the textures are at.

I came across some old 1024 by 1024 textures, with the majority of them being 512 by 512.

I noticed that the flat boxes are textured with the product image on all sides, not just on the front side. The front side is the only side that displays the image in a useful manner. The back side is against a wall, and the sides are extremely thin distorted images of no use for looking at.

This prompts me to ask what effect having all these faces textured with 512 by 512 or higher resolution images has on the speed of rendering?

Would the store have less gray texture time if all the sides of the product pictures except for the front had a minimum texture size image on them?

the grey boxes are seen while (mostly) the asset server is finding them and during transfer accross the internet

even a 1024x1024 image isnt really all that large for file transfers (somewhere around 26kb) when it hits your video memory, your card cant deal with compression when its drawing them

when you have abunch of large textures it uses up video ram quickly which causes images to phase in and out, but once its in your ram it wont take up any more space if theres 1 or 100 of them drawn on screen

when actually drawing the images your video card is scaling squashing streaching skewing barbcuing and brewing everything in realtime, realtime = gpu use, so yea it can drag your performance down having images rendered on unseen sides

my guess is that the loss in fps from dupe images is not even measurable, most of your fps drop is from using large textures (more pixels to do all that crap to) and overall geometry

I see the gray boxes after the pending downloads is at zero and bandwidth usage is minimal, at which point I assume the textures have all reached my computer, although I might be wrong about that.

FPS is this case is not a problem.

Folks setting up stores that use the "ten thousand boxes used as pictures" approach might do well to set the box texture to Blank before applying the product texture to only the front. Blank produces a a 32 by 32 texture, which I would think is bound to take less time to draw than a 512 by 512 or worse.

Hmm, I suppose the same number of pixels get drawn on the screen regardless of how many pixels the textures have. Or would they? It's conceivable (to me) that higher resolution textures could in some cases result in multiple writes for the same screen pixel while lower resolution textues wouldn't.

the same amount of pixels are drawn a box thats 128x128 pixels on screen will be that no matter what the image is

it takes more work for your video card to squosh a 1024x1024 into a 128x128 space in realtime

again im not shure on the exact load ... doing this in something like photoshop litterly takes less than a second, and its going for quality not speed

i always use blank images on all faces that dont need the image ... i use my own 8x8 textures white black and alpha, not really for speed, but it just looks crappy to have a squished image on a 1cm edge

Yes, it does look amateur, and this store has hundreds and hundreds of them.

Possibly this happens sometimes because people don't know about dragging a texture from the inventory to one face in order to texture just one face and are thinking they have to do the awkward "check the select texture checkbox then click on the face" so they just do it the easier default way.