Textures & Streaming
Textures are usually the biggest chunk of memory in a project. This is how to keep resolution, compression, mips, and the streaming pool under control.
3.1Resolution Discipline
From the master checklist: agree texture sizes with the artists based on gameplay views and memory cost. Most scene assets never fill enough screen pixels to justify 4K. A 4K BC7 texture with mips is ~21 MB; the 1K version is ~1.3 MB - a 16x saving. Compare the result at the intended camera distance before reducing the asset’s limit. Set Maximum Texture Size per asset (source stays high-res), assign correct Texture Groups so platform device profiles can scale everything for free, and reserve 4K for hero assets the camera gets close to.
3.2The Four Settings That Matter
| Check | Rule | Failure mode |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | Default for colour, BC5 Normalmap for normals, Masks for packed data, BC7 sparingly | Normal maps as DXT1 shade blocky; uncompressed textures eat 4-8x memory |
| sRGB | On for colour, off for data (normals, roughness, ORM) | Lighting subtly wrong everywhere |
| Mips | On for world textures; needs power-of-two sizes | No mips = shimmer + streaming can't work + full-res always resident |
| Never stream | Only for UI and special cases | Non-streaming world textures permanently occupy pool |
3.3The Streaming Pool
Unreal streams mips in and out of a fixed pool (r.Streaming.PoolSize). stat streaming tells you required vs available. When required exceeds the pool, textures go blurry - the correct fix is almost always reducing texture demand (sizes, groups, mips), not raising the pool, because the pool competes with meshes, audio, and gameplay for platform memory. Non-power-of-two textures can't mip or stream; they sit in memory at full resolution forever.
3.4Auditing At Scale
Use scripts or bulk-edit tools when reviewing a large texture library. Property Matrix (select all -> right-click -> Asset Actions -> Bulk Edit) fixes settings in bulk; the Asset Registry queries them by script - dimensions, format, sRGB, mip count, LOD group. That's exactly the texture pass in the Asset Health Dashboard: every oversized, wrongly-compressed, non-power-of-two, or sRGB-broken texture, ranked by wasted memory.