[Martin Smith]

Beware: using PNGs instead of DDSs may cause performance issues. DDS is a format that is optimized for graphic cards. I'm not sure if this would only impact the loading times or the rendering performance, though.

So I tried a little test recently to see what performance impact this trick would have on races.

I used the largest, most detailed livery I've ever made, and ran an AI race with 28 cars using their own different copy of the same livery, on a track (Grobnik) where I had experienced performance problems before.



Each skin folder consisted of 13 DDS files, every one of which was simply a renamed PNG file, and three of which had dimensions of 4K (body, map, and helmet). The total folder size for each car was 7 MB, which would have been 40 MB ~ish if I had rendered them as DDS like normal.

I did notice a slowdown, but only on loading. The cars took 4-5 times longer to load than normal, so about 2 minutes on my system to load all the cars and track.

Once in the session I had no issues of any kind, FPS, CPU load, temps, or any kind of hiccup.

So I figure there shouldn't be any issue for anyone else either since in AC we all have to load the skin files when we join, as opposed to when the player using that skin joins, so it wouldn't make any difference if someone joined in the middle of the session since we should all have every skin already loaded.