beerkeeper opened this issue on Jun 17, 2009 · 6 posts
pjz99 posted Wed, 17 June 2009 at 7:11 AM
Memory consumption is a lot more likely to come from texture resolution than the geometry itself. There's nothing wrong with reducing poly count at all (except how difficult it is), but you will get a lot more memory back by reducing TEXTURE SIZES. Every single 4000x4000 map = 48 megabytes of RAM. For a typical commercial V4 texture set:
Body color, bump, specular = 150mb
Limbs color, bump, specular = 150mb
Eye color = 50mb
Head color, bump, specular = 150mb
Eyelash transparency = 50mb (even though it's grayscale it is still uncompressed to full 24-bit color)
Inner mouth color, bump = 100mb
... for a grand total of 600 megabytes ... and they probably have hair and maybe a little bit of clothing? textures on those too!