Panda3D Manual: Texture Management and Optimizations
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The best way to make most of your texture space is to compress textures. Panda3d will choose the best method of compression. Setting your panda config:

compressed-textures 1

This will reduces the texture memory requirement by a factor of about 8. But if this is not enough and not enough graphic card memory is present for texture hungry application. You can tell panda to scale the textures on load:

texture-scale 0.5

This will further reduces texture memory requirement by a factor of 4. Smaller scales are also possible for even more gain. Keep in mind that quality will drop sharply as you start scaling it down.

There is no a good way to determine amount of available texture memory. Its best to ask the users and adjust accordingly.

Both OpenGL and DirectX are supposed to automatically unload textures that are no longer being rendered. Any kind of manual tweaking would be useless. DirectX provides the option for the graphics engine to do the texture management itself. This is done in panda by default in pandadx9.

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