Why are textures always square powers of two? What if they aren't?

Posted by Keavon on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Keavon
Published on 2012-03-26T00:52:58Z Indexed on 2012/03/26 5:43 UTC
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textures

Why are the resolution of textures in games always a power of two (128x128, 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024, etc.)? Wouldn't it be smart to save on the game's file size and make the texture exactly fit the UV unwrapped model?

What would happen if there was a texture that was not a power of two?

Would it be incorrect to have a texture be something like 256x512, or 512x1024? Or would this cause the problems that non-power-of-two textures may cause?

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Why are textures always square powers of two? What if they aren't? - Developer IT

Why are textures always square powers of two? What if they aren't?

textures

Related posts about textures

Textures on top of other textures when using VBOs

Texture switching with a entity system

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SDL2 sprite batching and texture atlases

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