power of two survey

[solarstorm]

is the power of two for all graphics (32x32) and frame size still the standard?

[arfa]

I can't understand the question.

There must be something on your mind but graphics are graphics - of all sizes - and the frame size is whatever you set.

Tiling perhaps?

[Nifflas]

If you use hardware acceleration in your game, you should keep image sizes to power of twos if you want to use the VRAM efficiently (personally I don't do this unless the images are very large). It shouldn't matter for the frame or window size however.

[Pixelthief]

As nifflas said, in a hardware accelerated mode, you definitely want your textures (sprites) to be powers of two, since virtually all graphics cards are built on these (and often only going up to 512x512, or maybe 256x256, before they start having to chop it up).

But thats only in terms of efficiency. Your program should still run fine barring any hardcoded pixel shader effects, even if your texture sizes are totally arbitrary. Having powers of two for your texture just makes it more efficient- the GPU might only operate on a single texture square instead of chopping it up and having to do multiple times the work.

But yeah it won't matter for window/frame size unless you are applying pixel shaders to that, since the frame is merely blitted to, not operated upon as a texture. If you're applying full frame shaders than thats a time you most definitely want to be a power of two. My current project uses several full-frame shaders at points and I made sure to make it 512x512.

But in software mode it won't matter

[Corlen]

Am I understanding correctly? Would 24x32 be appropriate to this? Or do the X and Y dimensions have to be exactly the same?

[Pixelthief]

at sizes like 24x32, it really shouldn't matter. Ideally you'd want each X and Y to be powers of two (24 is not). So it could be say 32x64. But unless you're talking about *large* sprites in HWA mode, it shouldn't make any noticeable difference. But its good to know that a pixel shader will apply much much much faster to a 512x512 texture than a 734x357 texture despite having the ~# pixels

I mean if you're doing some really really crucial core function with extreme processing requirements on these 24x32 pixel sprites it might make a difference, but in normal usage or tiling it shouldn't matter.