"Max texture size" or "LOD Bias" for downscaling textures in-game

[Zernat]

Hello. I would like to ask you for your help. I am looking for a way to downscale my textures size in a “healthy” way so it could boost my performance in-game (in cooked and if possible in non-cooked version too).

For now I found two options that piqued my interest. LOD Bias and Max Textures size. Via google I found nice description (I am sorry for google translate but I don’t speak japanese ):

LOD Bias always makes all textures one lower, but because Maximum Texture Size is the maximum limit, we limit to texture that exceeds that size only.

For example, if you have 256 textures and you set LODBias to 1, the texture will be 128, but if you set Maximum Texture Size to 1024, that 256 texture will not change.

So it seems that Max Textures size is what I am looking for. And for now I was really happy with it but I noticed that these textures are building almost every time when some changes are made in engine. At first it wasn’t that invasive but with every day when there are more and more textures coming it kinda starts to get annoying

So I wanted to ask - can I somehow use it better ? Or maybe I should use some other function or option ?

Thanks and Cheers !

[Deathrey (DeathreyCG)]

For limiting texture size in-game, you should use max texture size.

[anonymous_user_2709d010]

I’m not so sure. From the UE documentation of the Texture Editor:

The number of miplevels to drop before uploading the Texture. This value can be negative to compensate for the LODGroup’s LOD bias for a particular Texture. The LODBias, the LODGroup’s LOD bias and the NumCinematicMipLevels are all added together to form a final LOD bias value for the Texture. Mip-levels that cannot be reached in-game because of its LOD bias are removed from the cooked data on disk by Unreal Frontend to save disk space.

It looks to me like the LOD bias is what you should use here. I also remember hearing that elseqhere some years ago

[TorQueMoD]

Max texture will actually scale down the textures. LOD Bias only works when you’ve packaged your project (in-game, not editor) and will default to the specified LOD as the highest value if you run into performance issues. It’s a Bias not a fixed value which means it won’t always use the value specified. If you have a 4K texture and set the max texture size to 2048, it will not be allowed to go higher than 2048.