I just made a test map with a 16 layer landscape material and am not having any issues at all… Played it in standalone at 720p high scalability, full dynamic lighting with DFAO and got a solid 32fps; which is what my frame cap is set to. This is all on my crappy laptop that has a 540m in it. Yes, a 540m…
Some things you could do to lower the burden of things might be:
- Use the alpha channels of diffuse textures to store a mask or you could store an extra diffuse texture per three alphas and merge the channels.
- Remove the blue channels from the normal maps, store extra channels in their B and A channels, do the same as I just said and reconstruct the blue channel from the RG normal channels; to make the normal map complete again.
- Make texture atlases. An 8k texture can hold 4 4k, 16 2k, 64 1k textures in it. From there, you can just sample the region you need. You can even get fancy and store different sizes in it like 1 4k, 4 2k, 32 1k, etc etc.
EDIT: Just to make it more fair, I filled quite a few other material spots in with random channel info to simulate it having to work harder and STILL no change in fps…
EDIT 2: I set all the textures to shared wrap and painted all 16 onto one component just to show it still has no effect on my fps
