Always use 2D array textures instead of 2D textures?

OpenGL OpenGL: Advanced Coding
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I am considering treating all 2D textures in our engine as 2D array textures. This would allow us to add support for animated textures and texture variations, without needing any extra shaders. Before I do any testing, are there any known performance or other downsides to this decision?

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You can always make a 2D array texture view from a 2D texture. Because implementations are required to support this, I would not expect there to be any performance issues from creating them initially as array textures.

Indeed, Vulkan doesn’t even recognize a distinction between arrays with 1 layer and non-arrays at the image level, only at the view level.

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