Texture size

[nachus]

Hi,
I’m using Panda 1.8.1 to play a video (like in media-player sample).
I read in the manual that textures must be power of two. That apply to a video ? i mean, if the video size must be power of two too or i can use a video in any size (ex. 518x325)?.

Thanks!

[rdb]

It’s preferable. Panda will create a black border around your video automatically to scale it up to the next power of two.

Many video cards nowadays have not a lot of trouble with non-power-of-two-textures, so if you don’t care about the very old cards, you can simply disable this feature:
panda3d.org/manual/index.ph … xture_Size

[nachus]

Thanks rdb.
With very old video cards you mean something older than nvidea FX 5200 for example?

[rdb]

I really couldn’t say from personal experience how well each individual card and driver handles non-power-of-two textures, sorry.

From the OpenGL wiki:

@OpenGL Wiki

The R300 and R400-based cards (Radeon 9500+ and X500+) are incapable of generic NPOT usage. You can use NPOTs, but only if the texture has no mipmaps.

NV30-based cards (GeForce FX of any kind) are incapable of NPOTs at all, despite implementing OpenGL 2.0 (which requires NPOT). It will do software rendering if you try to use it.

All newer hardware can handle NPOTs of any kind perfectly.

Though keep in mind that it’s not just a question of whether NPOT textures are supported, it’s also a question of how well they perform under it. If they implement it by just upscaling a texture at the driver side, then there is of course little benefit - especially if they do the upscaling less efficiently than Panda does (eg. every time it is bound).