I have noticed in cycles I render faster with .tga image textures than .png image textures. Is there a loss in render quality because of using targas instead of pngs? Which should I use?
Asked
Active
Viewed 2,288 times
2
-
Hello :). This sounds interesting. Would you mind adding more details? Image resolution, render time difference, map type... Just curious :). – jachym michal Oct 03 '20 at 12:55
-
2The answer is: EXR. – troy_s Oct 03 '20 at 13:03
-
Hello @troy_s :). Doesn't the OP mean material image textures, not the output file? – jachym michal Oct 04 '20 at 18:05
-
Materials are the same answer. EXR is exemplary on all fronts, and is in many instances the only means to get things like reflections etc. into Blender. EXR is the only sane option for speed, size, quality, and encoding. – troy_s Oct 05 '20 at 00:00
1 Answers
0
PNG takes longer to read or write, because the computer needs to compress it. Therefore it takes up less space. TGA is largely uncompressed, so it's being written and read faster, but takes up more space. Both formats are loss-less, but I think the color range of TGA is larger. Targa is popular in Game Enginges because the Alpha channel is independent from the color channels and it reads very fast. EXR is usually the largest, but it supports HDR. I haven't tested it, but it should be read faster than PNG.
Frederik Steinmetz
- 2,879
- 1
- 8
- 11
-
1EXR can be smaller in size: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/148231/what-image-format-encodes-the-fastest-or-at-least-faster-png-is-too-slow/148466#148466 – brockmann Oct 03 '20 at 17:56
-
Hello :). Doesn't the OP mean image textures used in materials, instead of an output file? – jachym michal Oct 04 '20 at 18:07
-
You're correct, ups, but my answer works both ways. PNG ofc. also takes longer to decompress as it does to compress. – Frederik Steinmetz Oct 08 '20 at 11:57
-
I was referring to image textures for shaders. I almost always render in multi-layer exr. – Troy Carpenter Oct 16 '20 at 19:41
-