Maximum texture size?

See Device caps for Direct3D to find out the max. texture size.
Similarly, for OpenGL see "21.130 What's the maximum size texture map my device will render hardware accelerated?".

Oh, IIRC some ATI FireGL and NVIDIA Quadro cards do support 8k²-sized textures, though those are not customer cards [wink].

HTH,
Pat.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. What I mean is - is there any maximum size that D3D itself supports, rather than the driver / card? For instance, I haven't seen a card that supports textures larger than 4096x4096 - is this just because none of the IHVs have bothered to allow textures larger than that, or because D3D imposes a limit somewhere?

AFAIK there is no maximum limit. Like the SDK the WDK says nothing about a limit.

You should at least plan for 8192*8192 as this will be the minimum for D3D10 hardware.

Shader Model 3 has a minimum requirement of 4096x4096 iirc.

It wouldn't surprise me if IHV's didn't jump any higher than they had to:

1. If developers wont use it, why waste effort?
2. If it makes the minimum spec, why go higher?
3. VRAM requirements - "only 64mb"... but going to 8k means 256mb - its still fairly rare to find 512mb video cards...

hth
Jack

Quote:

Original post by jollyjeffers Shader Model 3 has a minimum requirement of 4096x4096 iirc. It wouldn't surprise me if IHV's didn't jump any higher than they had to: 1. If developers wont use it, why waste effort? 2. If it makes the minimum spec, why go higher? 3. VRAM requirements - "only 64mb"... but going to 8k means 256mb - its still fairly rare to find 512mb video cards... hth Jack

1. Forward thinking [smile]
2. See 1
3. My brain is fudge. I typed 8192x8192 into calculator, not 8192x8192x4...

If one texture is going to take up 256MB of VRAM, then I'm not surprised it's not (widely) supported [smile]

Thanks for the replies. I reckon it's fairly safe to assume that there wonh't be any textures larger than 65536x65536 anyway. That gives me 16 bits to play with. If there are any more, I can always clamp it...

Quote:

Original post by Evil Steve I reckon it's fairly safe to assume that there wonh't be any textures larger than 65536x65536 anyway.

well that'd only require 16 gigabytes of VRAM to store a 64k*64k texture [lol]

Jack

And that's before mipmapping. You'd need about 21GB of ram to store a fully mipmapped 65k^2 texture. (and 340MB for an 8k^2 texture)

Is that all? How long till video cards have their own virtual memory? [smile]

But, hardware has been supporting non-square textures for quite a while now, so using a 8k size for width, for example, doesnt mean you need to use it for height.

What if I need a sqrt lookup table with 8000 entries? a 8192x1x4 texture is only 32k. That's not much at all, so I am surprised that's not an option.

Quote:

Original post by Evil Steve Is that all? How long till video cards have their own virtual memory? [smile]

Early next year - one of Vista/DXGI/D3D10's new features is virtualised memory [wink]

But I wouldn't like to see the performance when I'm shifting bits of my texture between VRAM, Sys-RAM and my HDD [lol]

Quote:

But, hardware has been supporting non-square textures for quite a while now, so using a 8k size for width, for example, doesnt mean you need to use it for height. What if I need a sqrt lookup table with 8000 entries? a 8192x1x4 texture is only 32k. That's not much at all, so I am surprised that's not an option.

There's always one person who has to be sensible...

Jack

Quote:

Original post by jollyjeffers Early next year - one of Vista/DXGI/D3D10's new features is virtualised memory [wink] But I wouldn't like to see the performance when I'm shifting bits of my texture between VRAM, Sys-RAM and my HDD [lol] Jack

I don’t like to play devil’s advocate but the WDDM 1.0 virtual memory system will give us only a small improvement from what we have today. We get the option to swap out render targets but have to pay for it with every single byte that have to be travel from VRAM back to System RAM as there is no more backup copys like Direct3D 9 managed texture use.

Using more VRAM as you have will stiil be expensive. But as D3D10 have the requirement to create 128 MB resources I expect that most cards will have at least 256 MB.

WDDM 2.1 should be the great step.

Ugh, semi-drunk posting is bad. I realised I was thinking of a 1D lookup texture too - I'm sure a 64k lookup texture could be useful in some cases.

Anyway, thanks for the replies.

While we're on the subject, this just came up on the DIRECTXDEV list. A very cool suggestion there was using a 4k^2 cubemap. Couple be extra useful if you're in a tight spot with max texture size :).