Quote: "As far as I know FPSC will support any texture size as long as it's divisible by 2 (in effect not an odd number)."
As input, however the output options in the app itself are as I said above. So unless you edit the settings to allow higher resolutions (which not sure how many will), those are the options you're stuck with.
Quote: "Also of note is that FPSC automatically converts the textures to .dds format."
DDS itself, supports a buttload of formats.
It defaults to ARGB 32-bit (A8R8B8G8), and I'd be surprised if anyone at TGC had the common sense to change this default behaviour.. or feel it was worth their time using D3DX to convert them to DXT1-5 formats instead, that load quicker, run leaner and just do a better damn job than most engines texture systems for the advanced features as they're directly being done via the graphics card and api.
if FPSC detects a DDS is already in use it just copies it, so believe me creating them in that format to start with using the nvidia dds tools is just freaking invalueable.
especially when you consider:
an A8R8G8B8 512x512 DDS will take roughly 3s to load/commit
the same texture with pre-set mipmaps, filtering in DXT5 format will take <1s to load.
When we're talking the amount of media that FPSC loads on even a simple couple of room games we're looking at dropping loading time doing it with pre-set DDS over DBP DDS of almost 1/4 of the time, if not more.
This can mean the difference between a game loading in 10minutes and in 2.5minutes!
