What are the best practices for optimizing texture maps in games?

Absolutely! Mipmapping is indeed a vital optimization technique in game development. By providing textures at multiple resolutions, mipmapping ensures that the appropriate level of detail is used for rendering, depending on the distance from the camera. This not only enhances visual quality by reducing aliasing but also contributes to smoother performance by efficiently managing memory usage and rendering workload.

Exactly right! Using textures with dimensions that are powers of two, such as 64x64, 128x128, etc., can optimize memory usage and rendering performance, particularly on older graphics hardware. While modern GPUs can handle non-power-of-two textures, adhering to the 'power of two' rule ensures better compatibility across different platforms and reduces the risk of performance bottlenecks. However, in some cases, non-power-of-two textures are unavoidable, so it's essential to balance optimization with the specific needs of your game.

Using the power of two dimensions for texture maps is a common best practice for optimizing performance and ensuring compatibility with hardware and rendering algorithms. Graphics hardware and rendering algorithms are often optimized for textures with power of two dimensions. Also, Mipmapping works best with textures that have the power of two dimensions. Many texture compression algorithms and hardware optimizations work more effectively with textures that have the power of two dimensions. This can result in better performance and reduced memory usage.

Texture atlases will also reduce the number of shader variants created if the geometry is using the same material. One issue texture atlasing has: you need to subdivide your mesh of you want to use a repeating (tiling) texture.

By implementing LOD techniques for optimizing textures in games, we can achieve a balance between visual quality and performance, ensuring a smooth and immersive gaming experience across different viewing distances and hardware configurations.

One of the main principles of shader optimization is to minimize the number of instructions in a shader program. This can be achieved by simplifying complex calculations, avoiding unnecessary branching or looping, and optimizing mathematical operations to be more efficient.

Merged textures. If a texture map is going to use only the R and G channel, you are gonna end up wasting the space for B and A channels. You can use (an)other map(s) in these two channels and reduce the number of textures used in the game.