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  • Published 23 Jul 2025

Texture Optimization and Memory Management Tool

Recently, I faced a major issue in one of my scenes: despite using a powerful NVIDIA GPU with 12 GB of VRAM, I couldn’t get the scene to render at all. The rendering wouldn’t even start.

Even with Simplify enabled, texture limit set to 1K and subdivision capped at 2, the processor load was still too high. In the end, I had to manually downgrade over a thousand textures just to make the scene manageable. It was time-consuming and inefficient.

That’s why I suggest Blender should include a dedicated Texture Optimization Tool with features such as:

  • Automatic texture downgrade for selected objects or the entire scene.

  • Automatic texture compression, including the ability to convert formats (e.g., PNG to JPEG).

  • Material-based optimization, allowing all textures linked to a material to be compressed or resized.

  • Selection-based control, where you choose specific objects to optimize, with automatic saving of the optimized textures.

A memory manager, showing the texture and geometry impact on VRAM to help users make informed optimization decisions.

Such a tool would be extremely helpful for users dealing with heavy scenes, enabling better performance, fewer crashes, and a smoother workflow.

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Development Status: Open

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Luan-Rodrigues
23 Jul 2025

4 Comments

zuorion

Automatic texture compression, including the ability to convert formats (e.g., PNG to JPEG).

PNG or JPEG are not GPU compression formats. On PC only option is variants of BCn/DXT or ASTC on ARM.

1
Luan-Rodrigues Author

That makes sense. Even just having the option to reduce the resolution of multiple textures at once would already be quite helpful, especially to avoid overloading the processor during render loading, don’t you think?

zuorion

There could be

  1. Option per texture to compress (and to which format) texture or not.
  2. Option per texture to load it as lower than image size.
  3. Feature to automatically load texture only up to certain size based on how big it is on screen (mipmap streaming).

All those things are standard things that game engines does, and AFAIK in Blender actually all those things are planned, or talked about, or being worked on. But be aware, that those are long term plans few versions (or even years) ahead.

Revelant development links:

1
mike.c.pan

I ran into the same issues especially with purchased assets that would come with a whole bunch of flat 4k textures. So I coded a somewhat working addon here that reduces image size intelligently: github.com/mikepan/tex-compactor