by VanessaE » Sat Nov 24, 2012 02:23
My old laptop, a Dell Inspiron 9200 (1.6 GHz single core Pentium M) with onboard ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 graphics chip runs the default game textures at about 22 fps or so on average, while my 64px HDX pack tops out at about 18 fps on that machine.
The size of the texture pack download has little bearing on performance, since the textures will be expanded into a different, internal file format.
It just boils down to texture resolution - smaller is better, to a point. In practice, any 16px texture pack should perform the same as any other 16px pack. Same for any other resolution - one will be about the same as another of the same resolution.
Some folks have had some luck with 8px and even 4px textures, but the smaller you go, the less detail you can see, and most video devices won't show any further benefit at those sizes (indeed, some folks may even see a performance loss).