koobas.hobune.stream
Are unused texture pixels read by Unity's renderer?
Does Unity's renderer read the entire texture, or only the pixels the UVs overlap?
For example, in the following texture with the following UVs, only rows C, D, E and F are needed. Disregarding the extra storage space the rest of the texture occupies, are there any drawbacks to doing this?
Does the renderer read the entire texture or only the relevant pixels?
As I understand it, the entire texture is loaded into the GPU along with the mesh. It would only be when the texture is wrapped around the mesh that unused parts would be known. A larger texture would cause some delays as it is loaded into the GPU (as well as increased compression time during development) but unless we are talking about massive textures, I wouldn't have thought this is significant. Of course you would reach the limit of texture memory faster, but again not unless you have lots of large textures. ...So the downsides are probably more related to project size, development time and hitting storage limits, rather than performance issues.
