why would you use textures that are not a power of 2?

Posted by Will on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Will
Published on 2011-01-31T19:33:39Z Indexed on 2011/01/31 23:34 UTC
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opengl

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textures

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Performance

In the early days of OpenGL and DirectX, it was required that textures were powers of two. This meant that interpolation of float values could be done very quickly using shifting and such.

Since OpenGL 2.0, and preceding that via an extension, non-power-of-two texture dimensions has been supported.

Are there performance advantages to sticking to power-of-two textures on modern integrated and discrete GPUs?

What advantages do non-power-of-two textures have, if any?

Are there large populations of desktop users who don't have cards that support non-power-of-two textures?

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