Preview texture, render texture
If a user wants to render with an extremely large texture (e.g. through the cycles_texture_cache branch), blender currently has trouble with such a large texture due to blender (rather than cycles) handling that image data robustly or efficiently.
Simplify is available, but causes computational overhead (and can fail on extremely large textures in my local testing, resulting in a tool crash).
My suggestion is for a separate, non-render 'preview' texture that would be used to specify a 'proxy' image that can be used in the viewport and general operation of blender. Only when really rendering would the non-proxy image be used.
3 Comments
this operation could be done by the software automatically and without user interaction
The simplify texture in scene may be here for you
@a5693821: Simplify only works if the application doesn't crash when loading the texture, and it also causes re-processing overhead with each scene load. A proxy image avoids both of these problems, reducing resource consumption until render and CPU time in terms of simplifying the image (resizing it) on scene load. For large scenes with many textures, or complex setups, proxy images seem like a better approach.