Doed anyone know the size limit for a single texture in Skyrim?

[volnaiskra]

I'm wondering what the exact limit is for a DDS file in Skyrim's engine. 4096 x 4096 files obviously work, since many mods use them successfully. I've resized a certain vanilla DDS from 1024 x 512 to 8192 x 4096. When I saved it in 8.8.8.8 format, it didn't work, but instead produced a purple texture. But when I saved it in the much smaller DXT1 format, it did work. That leads me to suspect that the limit is based on filesize, and not resolution.

 

Does anyone know the exact limit? Or is it perhaps tied to the settings of the particular mesh? Or is the limit calculated cumulatively, in conjunction with all other textures currently in memory?

 

I should mention that I tested the DDS mentioned above in a small indoor location, and I don't believe I was anywhere near the 3.1GB limit. My GPU has 6GB of vram. I should also mention that yes, yes, I know that textures above 4k are in most cases pointless (I would argue that even most 4k textures are pointless), but let's leave that discussion out of it please. Besides, there are a few situations in the game where certain objects are so big that their textures are stretched to many times the size of the monitor when your character is up close, and even 4K textures get somewhat stretched in these cases.

[camaro_69_327]

Microsoft says>>>http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff476876(v=vs.85).aspx

 

In the chart you can see MAX Texture sizes...not sure are we using Direct x 9.1 , 9.2 ? it must be 9.3 because that is the first to get up to 4096...

 

Damn..DX 11 gets >16384 (16K?)...hahah, Saw a different chart ONE Texture at this size takes 1024 MB Vram...hahahhahaha

DX 10 Gets... 8K (8196)

 

Some day we may actually have GPU's with 1024 GB of VRAM...till then COMPRESS!

 

EDIT: don't fully understand ,,,so its the CARD (GPU) that has these limits and not the game ?...so any GPU that is DX 11 could handle 16K textures and the game would display them??? WOW.

Edited October 22, 2014 by camaro_69_327

[volnaiskra]

The biggest factor in how much VRAM a texture takes up is the compression type, not the resolution. I just did some tests, and a 16384 x 16384 file is 1.4GB when saved in 8.8.8.8 format, but only 174MB when saved in DXT1 format. Textures saved in DXT remain compressed in VRAM according to this page.

 

 

So, after some more testing, it seems that textures up to 16k do indeed work. I don't know why I got the purple texture before. Maybe I just got unlucky with a corrupted DDS file.

 

I successfully got the following variants to display in-game:

8192 x 8192 DXT1 (43mb)

8192 x 8192 DXT3 (87mb)

8192 x 8192 8.8.8.8 (350mb)

16384 x 16384 DXT1 (174mb)

16384 x 8192 DXT5 (174mb)

 

The only files that didn't work (infinite loading screen....or at least it seemed to be - I force closed the process after a minute or two) were:

16384 x 8192 8.8.8.8 (600MB)

16384 x 16384 8.8.8.8 (1.4GB)

(I also tried making a 32k x 32k file, but I got a "cannot save - out of memory error" in Photoshop, even though I have 32GB of RAM - ouch!)

 

So it seems like filesize is the mitigating factor here. As for the purple texture I got initially, and which spurred me to create this thread, I guess it was an unlucky corrupted file, or maybe user error.