   Combining textures - Increased performance?
  Hello everybody!Im planning to improve the performance of my application. I suspect that the main problem is that i have to make up to 1024 calls to DrawPrimitive for each terrainfile (and i have always 9 files loaded) because it has 256 subchunks and every of them may have up to 4 textures.My idea was: I combine all the level 0 textures of the 256 chunks at loadtime to a big texture, all the level 1 textures, ...But before i begin to code and optimize that id like to ask you:Does that increase the performance? I think yes, because i only have 4 drawcalls left for each file and i think no because the texture that gets rendered now is 256 times bigger.What is the correct answer?GreetingsPlerion   
  The technique you are planning to do is called texture atlas. In general it’s faster for the reason you already know as each draw call cause some overhead on the CPU and GPU. The larger texture should not be a problem as GPUs are very good in caching such data. But you need to be careful if you use large textures as the hardware out there have different limits when it comes to the maximum supported texture size.   ;  Yes, thats a point. What may be some common limits of the textures? 4096 x 4096 may be a bit too big, right?   ;  You can find information about common cards in the \Samples\C++\Direct3D\ConfigSystem folder. There is a CardCaps.pdf and CardCaps.xls file. The values you should check are MaxTextureWidth and MaxTextureHeight. In general 2048 might be a better value. But you can offer higher resolutions if the hardware supports it.   ;  If you're working with DX10 and up you can use Texture Arrays, way simpler to implement and work with than texture atlas IMO. But again..if your on DX9 or lower - that's your only option :)   