Texture resolution guide: 512, 1K, 2K, 4K or 8K?

Texture resolutions at a glance

In texture talk, "1K" means 1024 pixels, not 1000, and a "4K texture" is 4096 × 4096, not the 3840 px of a 4K screen. Each step up doubles the width and the height, so it holds four times as many pixels and costs four times the memory.

Resolution only counts when it reaches the screen. A crate that never fills more than a few hundred pixels on screen looks the same at 1K and 4K, but the 4K version uses 16 times the memory.

Which resolution for which asset

These are starting points, not a standard. Start here, check the asset in your engine at the closest distance the player or camera will reach, and go down a size if you cannot see a difference.

Two rules matter more than the exact numbers. First, keep neighbours consistent: a 4K wall next to a 1K floor looks worse than both at 2K, because the eye notices the jump in sharpness. Second, not every map needs the same size. A material can use a 2K colour map with a 1K roughness map, because smooth grey maps lose little when they are smaller.

Texture resolution by platform: mobile, PC, VR, Roblox and web

Roblox texture size

Roblox’s texture specifications (checked 2026-10-18) say the engine supports textures up to 4096 × 4096 and loads lower-quality versions first, raising quality to suit the device. The same page suggests 256 px for a 5 × 5 stud object, 512 px for 10 × 10 studs and 1024 px for 20 × 20 studs.

For PBR maps on avatar items (SurfaceAppearance), its budget table stops at 1024 × 1024 (maximum) for full-body clothing and humanoid characters, and allows at most 256 × 256 for the non-colour maps (roughness, metalness, normal) of rigid accessories. Marketplace rigid accessories cannot exceed 2048 × 2048. Part of the page still says 1024 × 1024 is the maximum, so for avatar items 1024 px is the safe choice.

Power of two: why texture sizes are 512, 1024, 2048 and 4096

A power-of-two (POT) texture has sides of 2 multiplied by itself: 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192. The sides do not have to match: 2048 × 1024 is power of two too, because each side is. Sizes such as 1000 × 1000 or 3000 × 2000 are non-power-of-two (NPOT).

Engines still prefer POT sizes for three practical reasons:

• Mipmaps halve cleanly. A mipmap chain is the texture at half size, quarter size and so on, down to 1 × 1, used when the surface is far away. A 4096 px texture halves evenly 12 times (13 levels in all). An odd size has to round at some levels, which can blur or shift detail.
• Block compression works in 4 × 4 blocks. GPU formats such as BC1 to BC7 and ASTC store the image in small blocks, so sides need to be a multiple of the block size. Every POT size from 4 up is.
• Older and some platforms limit NPOT textures. WebGL 1 cannot make mipmaps for NPOT textures or repeat (tile) them. Unity’s manual says NPOT textures take a little more memory and are scaled up to the next power of two on platforms that do not support them.

If your texture is 3000 × 3000, resize it to 2048 or 4096 before export, or pad it to 4096 if you cannot rescale it. A plain resize up to the next size adds pixels but no detail. To get real detail, see how to increase texture resolution below. UI images, which are never mipmapped or tiled, are the usual exception where NPOT is fine.

How much memory a texture uses (VRAM maths)

File size on disk tells you little, because a PNG or JPG shrinks by however much that image happens to compress. What counts is the size in video memory once the GPU has it. The maths is simple:

• Uncompressed (RGBA, 8 bits per channel): bytes = width × height × 4.
• With mipmaps: add the half-size, quarter-size and smaller levels. They add one third, so multiply by about 1.33.
• Block compressed: BC1 stores each 4 × 4 block in 8 bytes (half a byte per pixel). BC3, BC5 and BC7 use 16 bytes per block (one byte per pixel). That is 8 times and 4 times smaller than RGBA.

Worked out for one square texture (1 MB = 1,048,576 bytes):

A real material is several maps. A typical PBR set of three (base colour, normal, and one packed roughness / metal / AO image) at 2K costs about 64 MB uncompressed with mipmaps, or about 16 MB with BC7 and BC5. The same set at 4K costs about 256 MB uncompressed or 64 MB compressed. Multiply by every unique material in a scene and it is clear why games use 4K sparingly.

Mobile and standalone VR usually use ASTC instead of BC. Every ASTC block is 128 bits whatever its size, so the block size sets the quality: 4 × 4 gives 8 bits per pixel (like BC7), 6 × 6 about 3.56 and 8 × 8 just 2. A 2K texture with mipmaps is about 2.4 MB at 6 × 6 and 1.3 MB at 8 × 8.

Browser viewers and most GLB files use PNG or JPG, which the GPU receives fully decoded. A 4K PNG in a web viewer costs about 85 MB of video memory with mipmaps, however small the file is. KTX2 (Basis Universal) textures stay compressed on the GPU.

Texel density: how to work out the size you need

A texel is one pixel of a texture as it sits on the model, and texel density is how many texels cover one metre (or one unit) of surface. It is the real measure of sharpness: a 4K texture stretched over a building can be blurrier than a 512 px texture on a coin. If the term is new, UV unwrapping explained explains it in plain English.

• Density = texture size in px × the share of the texture the surface uses ÷ the surface’s size in metres.
• Texture size needed = target density × surface size in metres ÷ the share of the texture it uses.

Example: a 2 m wide wall that fills the whole 2048 px texture has 2048 ÷ 2 = 1024 px per metre. A 4 m wall at the same density would need a 4096 px texture, or you could tile a 2K texture twice across it and keep 2K. A character whose UV islands use only 70% of the texture width gets 70% of the density you might expect, so tight UV packing raises sharpness for free.

To choose a target, decide how close the camera gets. At that distance, about one texel per screen pixel is the ceiling worth paying for: past it the GPU drops to a smaller mipmap anyway, so the extra pixels cost memory but cannot show. Then give every asset in the scene roughly the same density, so nothing looks sharper or blurrier than its neighbours.

To skip the arithmetic, the free texel density calculator works out the density from a texture size and surface size, or the texture size you need for a target density.

How to increase texture resolution

Scaling an image up in an editor makes it bigger, not sharper. To actually gain detail there are three routes, plus one free fix:

Our AI texture upscaler does the first route in the browser: 2x or 4x for PNG, JPG and WebP textures up to 4096 px per side (results up to 8192 px), with a Seamless option for tiling textures and a Normal map option that keeps normal maps valid. It can also open a GLB and upscale the textures inside it, up to 4096 px each. For the full step-by-step, with the right method per map type and the DDS round trip, read how to upscale textures.

Re-baking is covered in what is texture baking. If your normal map is the blurry one and you have its colour or height texture, it is often easier to make a fresh one at the new size with the free normal map generator.

Texture resolution in the AI 3D Texturing Studio

The AI 3D Texturing Studio paints the whole model in your browser and picks the texture size from your device:

• 2048 px on most desktops and laptops (when the graphics chip supports 4096 px textures), and 1024 px on phones and small screens.
• Up to 4096 px for dense meshes that get new UVs, such as scans and high-poly STL files, so each small triangle still gets enough texels (up to 2048 px on small screens).
• With Keep my UVs, the texture you download keeps your file’s own texture resolution when it had one, so a model that came with a 4K texture exports at 4K.

Each AI view is a 1024 px image projected onto the model, so very small parts get fewer pixels than the texture can hold. For a sharper final texture, export the GLB and run it through the texture upscaler at 2x.

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