A lot of textures (400+)

OpenGL OpenGL: Basic Coding
1

I got a small project running with a lot of textures(400+). I figure that ain´t no good to bind them all at init. (They don´t fit in VRAM). My question is: What are the different ways to handle large texture resources in a project?

2

I think that you can bind them all (however verifying the success of the operation) and prioritize textures with the appropriate functions: so you can let opengl to handle the tranfers of the textures form ram to vram…

3

you could attempt to concatenate the textures (assuming that they are small) this would entail making the small textures a bigger one in a quilt like fashion and modifying texture coordiates

4

Just the same problem.
If I have lots of 32X32 textures will it be better(faster) if I concatenate them?

5

Sure, since you dont have to call glBindTexture every so often. The drawback is just that repeating/tiling the textures becomes a bit impossible.

Have to break up geometry then.

6

Also, when you page textures like this gluBuild2DMipmaps won’t work correctly so you’ll have to generate your own mipmaps.