Does compressing files improve load/viewer performance?

[LR]

Compressing a PNG by using color indexing, for example. Or do only dimensions matter?

[ThomasFuchs · Accepted solution]

Hi ZR,

this is a trade off between two bottlenecks:

1. reading files from disk
2. decompressing the files on the CPU

The answer depends on your hardware and compression method. I would recommend to use standard compression to reduce the file size. After reading the textures they are sent to the GPU via the Open GL interface. For CityEngine's procedural runtime 'GL Texture Compression' is enabled by default, what should give best GPU performance. Texture compression is provided by the driver and is independent of the original image format.