Question by DMCH · Jun 01, 2013 at 07:30 PM · texture material change cost

Cost of changing texture

Hello,

I'm working on a top down PC game. Is it safe to assume that the cost of changing a material's texture is miniscule? Trying to figure out the arrangement of sprite sheets, and it would be simpler to do it this way.

Thanks for reading

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Benproductions1 · Jun 03, 2013 at 01:24 AM 1

It depends on the texture. You could instead always load both beforehand and on switch hide one and show another

robertbu · Jun 03, 2013 at 05:37 AM 1

The cost of switching textures already loaded should be small. But if you have a lot of game objects with different textures but the same material otherwise, you can reduce your drawcalls by using a texture atlas and switching the UVs instead.

syclamoth · Jun 03, 2013 at 05:39 AM 1

The biggest cost will be loading the texture into graphics memory. There will be a noticeable hang if you are loading a lot of textures simultaneously- but the trick is that if you do this at the beginning of a level and put a 'LOADING' card on top, nobody will care.

DMCH · Jun 18, 2013 at 08:55 PM 0

Sorry for the slow response, was out of bounds for a while there. Thanks for the suggestions. I've already assigned the texture to a Texture2D field, so it won't need to be loaded on the fly. The texture changes only happens with one gameobject, whenever the player character changes weapon, so it might happen a few times a minute. Nothing to worry about I guess.