Textures & Streaming

3.1Resolution Discipline

From the master checklist: use lower texture sizes than artists want. 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 that's usually invisible in game. 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 color, 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 color, 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

Nobody checks 3,000 textures by hand. 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.