#7
14th Aug 2016 at 12:43 PM
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Well, how higher the polycount, how more effort the game needs to do to render it (if you have used a 3D program and rendered anything with it, you'll know that whenever you render a really high polycount, it needs a lot of time to re-render the frames, same thing with the sims).
Textures however, I guess the reason why they take longer to render is that it needs to gather all the textures that an object has linked to it. So I guess, say you would make a object without any additional textures and only has a Diffuse texture, it might render faster than when you do have the additional textures (Specular map, bump map, mask, etc.)
And then there is this other issue with textures being too big in size. Back in the days games had texture sizes that were like 64x64 (I've seen them in 2005>2007 games as well).
Which I think, is either because of the amount of 'additional' textures, or because the polycount was higher than it should. (Although these are Playstation games i'm taking about.)
Then there is this thing with PC games. When we take a look at TS2, if you would set the game to the lowest quality, it would have 64x64 textures. But Maxis back then had a system called 'LIFOs' which are texture files that where the max setting which were 516x516 >1024x1024 sizes. if a computer was able to handle the highest quality back in the days.
Having the texture history behind us, there are two possibilities why textures might lag: Size, or additional textures. And maybe even the data the game needs to read to gather all the textures together.