Power of 2 Textures with Sprite Animation

Question

I want a texture to contain each frame of a sprite's animation. Let's say each frame was 128x128 pixels, and there was 4 frames. Then it could easily fit into one 256x256 texture. If I have for instance 25 frames, then it'd have to fit into one 640x640 texture (128*5=640). However I read that texture dimensions should be powers of 2 for the best results, forcing the dimensions to be 1024x1024, which is much larger than the original size. In this case would it be better to have each frame loaded into respective textures of dimensions 128x128?

Answer 1

Each time you change the texture you suffer a hit in performance. As such it would be better to use one large texture especially if you have multiple of the same sprites that could be in different frames of the animation.

Some hardware will not support non-power-of-2 (NPOT) textures but these are becoming fewer and further between these days. Its probably best to keep to the power-of-2 (POT) texture limitation. Have you checked to see if you can get multiple different sprites and their animations into 1 large texture? The more frame of sprites you can bang into a single texture the fewer times you need to change the texture and hence the faster things will run ...