Texture compression
| Optimizing
your framerate using texture compression. |
|
Texture compression (available since v0.5.3b5) is a technique
used with todays graphics cards for the following reasons:
- Memory usage on the card is reduced
- Rendering is slightly faster
Your graphics card must be able to support this (OpenGLs ARB_texture_compression).
By default, Racer turns texture compression on where possible (the only con
seems to be slightly longer loading times for the compression to take place).
Compression does lead to some amount of image degradation; therefore, it can
be turned off at 3 levels.
- racer.ini has a textures.compression
variable. If set to 0, none of the textures will be compressed. Expect a slightly
slower framerate.
- Shader files (track.shd/car.shd) can specify shader<x>.compression=0
to turn off compression for all layers. Note that if a texture is already
loaded in a previous shader, the first compression state will be used (texturemaps
are cached, so only loaded once to avoid memory waste). This will be most
useful for sky shaders, since those maps often have soft gradients where compression
becomes most obvious.
- A layer in a shader can turn off compression by adding a
shader<x>.layer<n>.compression=0 line.
(last
updated
November 13, 2012
)
