Warning: Texture Streaming Pool Over 650MB

Development Rendering
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I’ve been playing around with materials, finally I got this warning message, “Texture Streaming Pool Over 650MB”.

I’m a bit lost in terms of what I should aim for. Modern GPUs got 2GB-8GB of VRAM. Or is this warning not about that?

What’s the maximum of texture memory I should use for a PC project, Game or Archviz? What counts to that memory, only textures in the scene or also in the content browser?

Thanks.

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Hello frMage,

You cannot set your texture pool size near as large as the amount of VRAM your card has. If you have a 4GB card, and framebuffers are 400MB then you can probably only go between 2-3GB for the texture pool.

The warning appears when you have exceeded the recommended pool size depending on your VRAM. You can adjust this but it is not recommended.

The way to adjust this is by entering the console command r.Streaming.PoolSize ____ and you can enter a value at the end. If you have 2GB of VRAM I recommend not exceeding 1000. You will see performance issues if you exceed this value.

1 Like
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Thanks .
Please allow me to ask those questions again:
What size should one aim for, for a PC game?
What counts to the texture pool? Only things in scene or stuff in the content browser too? I suppose size is the uncompressed image size?
I got a 4GB card btw.

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1.) Depends on the game. Assuming most gamers have a 4gb graphics card I wouldn’t exceed 1800-2000. As a rule if you don’t need that much information don’t use it.

2.) Texture pool size is associated with what you see in your viewport. Everything that will be associated within your project when you play or package.

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I just want to add that I was getting the same warning message because I was viewing all my textures in the Content Browser. Might not apply to your specific case, but just know that the textures you’re viewing outside of the game environment contribute to your texture streaming pool.

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I turned off texture streaming. Will this effect my performance? I have a 980 with 4GB VRAM. Btw im working with huge textures. I was over by 6700mb

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Why is it recommended? I mean I have 16GB of RAM, and I get errors in 100 mb…

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I know this post is old, but if anyone is still looking for help, this may do: r.Streaming.PoolSize 2000
// where 2000 is some big number you like

But the root problem could just be some of your assets have 4k or 8k textures, which is often not necessary.

  • Assets from Kite demo, for example, can have 4k or 8k textures
  • Export their TGA, back it up, reduce it to 1024, reimport, rebuild lighting, save.
  • Check your total look difference vs your total performance improvement.

Same TGA resize, with approximate file sizes by image dimensions
1024 - 4mb file size
4096 - 64mb
8192 - 260mb

If you are doing some beauty shot or with a high resolution asset very close to camera, or it is a main asset close to the player all the time, then fine. If the asset is usually far away, consider dropping the texture size real hard.

Consider merging your Height texture and Roughness texture into the alpha channels of the Albedo and the Normal texures (if the material is opaque). you can do this in Substance Designer using RGBA split and RGBA merge. Doing so removes two textures from your texture count.