Texture Compression in Advanced Render settings

Petra

I have mine at default.

To set those higher, would that result in better render quality for textures?

onix

I wonder if anyone knows what this compression thing does

On one forum I found an idea that it resamples textures depending on the camera distance

But I doubt that it will improve quality if you disable compression it is not like it can be noticed anyway

Petra

Thank you for the quick reply, onix :)

Anim

Medium Threshold:

Every texture image with a resolution lower than what is set there gets no compression.

Medium Threshold to High Threashold:

Every texture image with a resolution between medium and high gets medium compression

Every texture image with a resolution above High Threshold gets max compression.

This is a functionality to reduce GPU vram usage. As long as there are textures falling into the thresholds they will be compressed to use less vram. E.g. if you set min. and max. to 8200 then only textures above that resolution will get compression. Because most textures are not "bigger" than 8192 pixels that means you more or less get no compression at all. In my tests I noticed better quality of hair textures with no compression - but the difference is not that big. On the other hand, without compression the vram consumption increases significantly and in heavy scenes causes the render to either fail or fallback to CPU:

onix

Anim said:

Medium Threshold:

Every texture image with a resolution lower than what is set there gets no compression.

Medium Threshold to High Threashold:

Every texture image with a resolution between medium and high gets medium compression

Every texture image with a resolution above High Threshold gets max compression.

This is a functionality to reduce GPU vram usage. As long as there are textures falling into the thresholds they will be compressed to use less vram. E.g. if you set min. and max. to 8200 then only textures above that resolution will get compression. Because most textures are not "bigger" than 8192 pixels that means you more or less get no compression at all. In my tests I noticed better quality of hair textures with no compression - but the difference is not that big. On the other hand, without compression the vram consumption increases significantly and in heavy scenes causes the render to either fail or fallback to CPU:

 

This is self-evident but what triggers that compression anyway?  

 

Richard Haseltine

onix said:

Anim said:

Medium Threshold:

Every texture image with a resolution lower than what is set there gets no compression.

Medium Threshold to High Threshold:

Every texture image with a resolution between medium and high gets medium compression

Every texture image with a resolution above High Threshold gets max compression.

This is a functionality to reduce GPU vram usage. As long as there are textures falling into the thresholds they will be compressed to use less vram. E.g. if you set min. and max. to 8200 then only textures above that resolution will get compression. Because most textures are not "bigger" than 8192 pixels that means you more or less get no compression at all. In my tests I noticed better quality of hair textures with no compression - but the difference is not that big. On the other hand, without compression the vram consumption increases significantly and in heavy scenes causes the render to either fail or fallback to CPU:

 

This is self-evident but what triggers that compression anyway? 

The image size, that's what the threshold values are for.

marble

Richard Haseltine said:

onix said:

Anim said:

Medium Threshold:

Every texture image with a resolution lower than what is set there gets no compression.

Medium Threshold to High Threshold:

Every texture image with a resolution between medium and high gets medium compression

Every texture image with a resolution above High Threshold gets max compression.

This is a functionality to reduce GPU vram usage. As long as there are textures falling into the thresholds they will be compressed to use less vram. E.g. if you set min. and max. to 8200 then only textures above that resolution will get compression. Because most textures are not "bigger" than 8192 pixels that means you more or less get no compression at all. In my tests I noticed better quality of hair textures with no compression - but the difference is not that big. On the other hand, without compression the vram consumption increases significantly and in heavy scenes causes the render to either fail or fallback to CPU:

 

This is self-evident but what triggers that compression anyway? 

The image size, that's what the threshold values are for.

The image size or the texture resolution? 

Richard Haseltine

marble said:

Richard Haseltine said:

onix said:

Anim said:

Medium Threshold:

Every texture image with a resolution lower than what is set there gets no compression.

Medium Threshold to High Threshold:

Every texture image with a resolution between medium and high gets medium compression

Every texture image with a resolution above High Threshold gets max compression.

This is a functionality to reduce GPU vram usage. As long as there are textures falling into the thresholds they will be compressed to use less vram. E.g. if you set min. and max. to 8200 then only textures above that resolution will get compression. Because most textures are not "bigger" than 8192 pixels that means you more or less get no compression at all. In my tests I noticed better quality of hair textures with no compression - but the difference is not that big. On the other hand, without compression the vram consumption increases significantly and in heavy scenes causes the render to either fail or fallback to CPU:

 

This is self-evident but what triggers that compression anyway? 

The image size, that's what the threshold values are for.

The image size or the texture resolution? 

How are those different?

marble

Richard Haseltine said:

marble said:

Richard Haseltine said:

onix said:

Anim said:

Medium Threshold:

Every texture image with a resolution lower than what is set there gets no compression.

Medium Threshold to High Threshold:

Every texture image with a resolution between medium and high gets medium compression

Every texture image with a resolution above High Threshold gets max compression.

This is a functionality to reduce GPU vram usage. As long as there are textures falling into the thresholds they will be compressed to use less vram. E.g. if you set min. and max. to 8200 then only textures above that resolution will get compression. Because most textures are not "bigger" than 8192 pixels that means you more or less get no compression at all. In my tests I noticed better quality of hair textures with no compression - but the difference is not that big. On the other hand, without compression the vram consumption increases significantly and in heavy scenes causes the render to either fail or fallback to CPU:

 

This is self-evident but what triggers that compression anyway? 

The image size, that's what the threshold values are for.

The image size or the texture resolution? 

How are those different?

For me, the image size is what I set it to in the render settings ...

Richard Haseltine

OK, I mean the size of the texture image, not the final render image. It's the maps passed to the renderer, those which are above a threshold get that compression type before being passed over.

marble

Richard Haseltine said:

OK, I mean the size of the texture image, not the final render image. It's the maps passed to the renderer, those which are above a threshold get that compression type before being passed over.

Yep, I thought so but just wanted to make sure that the final image size had no bearing on what's being discussed here. 

Eternal Force

Is this feature obsolete now? I cannot find "Advanced" Pane in my Daz Studio 4.24.

felis

Eternal Force said:

Is this feature obsolete now? I cannot find "Advanced" Pane in my Daz Studio 4.24.

It has been moved to Render > Optimization 

crosswind

Eternal Force said:

Is this feature obsolete now? I cannot find "Advanced" Pane in my Daz Studio 4.24.

Since DS 4.22, Advanced page is split into three pages: Hardware, Canvases and Bridge... almost no change in terms of functionality but Texture Compression relevance is moved to Editor tab > Optimization.

Eternal Force

Got it! Thank you, guys! 

Richard Haseltine

See

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/change_log_4_23_0_1#4_22_1_40
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/change_log_4_23_0_1#4_22_1_53

nVida made a change, https://raytracing-docs.nvidia.com/iray/manual/index.html#iray_photoreal_render_mode#rendering-options-iray , 

mi::IString iray_texture_compression = ""
    Allows to globally override the per-texture texture compression option by setting this attribute to any of the values "off", "medium" or "high". Note that textures used via tex::lookup_float3 are classified as normal maps internally and only the override value "off" is respected in that case to avoid artifacts (as normal maps do not compress well).

which led to Daz moving the setting, and making it saveable with the scene.

jbowler

onix said:

I wonder if anyone knows what this compression thing does

On one forum I found an idea that it resamples textures depending on the camera distance

There is probably a dev in NVidia who knows what it does but maybe he or she no longer works there.  I concur that it does not seem to be documented.  If I were the dev there would be three things I would consider:

1) If I get a compressed texture I don't uncompress it, I keep it as is and use built in decompression in the graphics card as required.  As a dev I **always** do this, it's obvious, yet it is curious how many devs insist on uncompressing things then are amazed at how much memory has been consumed...

2) If not (1) I would compress using a target-appropriate compression method.  Apart from the note Richard quotes (which just says it is really dumb to compress normal maps as though they are photographs) which implies that the devs in NVidia have woken up to the fact that the different texture maps need different compression for purely colour data (not bump maps, not normal maps, not transmission maps, etc) I would probably go for JPEG-XL ATM.

3) If I got really desparate I might consider downsampling; I'd do it right so you wouldn't notice but I'd still feel guilty.

Yet, as you say, if the darn'ed texture is so far away that _its_ pixels aren't as big as the _render pixels_ then it gets downsampled regardless.  It would be criminally dumb to do otherwise, even if I have to use sinc to solve the objections of the programme managers.