Reducing texture overhead

I'm trying to be sensible about how I'm using textures on my parcel and I have some questions. I'll use the word overhead to describe the cost of texture choices.

If I use one basic texture to hide the wood grain on several prims, does applying different colors to each of the prims add to the overhead? Does each color actually act like a different texture?

What effect does the bumpiness parameter have on overhead?

In Advanced --> Console --> Textures, what is this display telling me? It looks like the display changes as I change my view of my surroundings, so I'm assuming the console just shows what's within my draw distance and is not confined to my parcel.

I see from reading some of the stickies that I've already made some bad choices on texture sizes (!).

Thanks for helping me think about this.

I'm no expert but I always *assumed* that colours added in the texture tab have no renedering cost. My logic is that no colour, as in the default white, would require the little gremlin engineer inside the graphics card to set RGB values of 255, 255 and 255, for instance. So I don't see how finagling a nice viridian with values of 20, 103 and 100 would vex him any more than the default would.

As for bumpiness, I'm sure I read somewhere on these forums that this is expensive to render and I have noticed that bumpy textures sometimes fail to get bumpy at all - even on a tile by tile basis - when the network connection was slow or the gremlin was possibly asleep. Lazy bugger.

I would dearly like to see an explanation of the Texture Console myself. Hopefully somebody who actually knows what they're talking about will chip in with an answer.

The texture console has a lot of information packed into it. There is a pretty good rundown at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Texture_Console

There are some smallish changes in Snowglobe-based viewers, there is a new HTP status when map textures are being downloaded from Amazon, and the memory graphs are changed a bit. But, that page will still give you enough information to figure out what is going on.

Thanks for that, Viktoria.

Some reading in there. Coffee and a plate of biscuits material by the look of it.

Thank you both!

Yeah, I think I read that the bumpiness effects were not a great idea.

Thanks for the link to the console info. That's interesting about the discard level and decreasing texture detail. My "8: Graphical representation of 2 (Amount of texture data currently bound by OpenGL / Threshold at which we decrease texture detail*) wasn't looking too healthy.