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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T23:23:38+00:00

I am implementing a game engine using OpenGL and wonder if it’s a good

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I am implementing a game engine using OpenGL and wonder if it’s a good idea to manually unload textures that are not used within a certain radius of the camera. It has been suggested to me for Android and OpenGL ES that it might be a good idea to load and unload textures on the fly as needed to save memory. Is this recommended for OpenGL ES and OpenGL? I am personally not convinced by the approach but I am curious as to when this will have benefits, if any, in the setting of OpenGL on a desktop PC and with OpenGL ES on a mobile phone.

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  1. Editorial Team

    It will depend on how many textures/the size of the textures you use in your game.

    I believe the magic number is minimum 10MB of texture memory, so if your textures use more than that people tend to use texture compression (phone compatibility issues here, some compression formats are proprietary, there’s a whole topic on this). You could unload textures when they aren’t being used but there will be a heavy cost when you reload them, so be aware of that.

    Generally speaking, you shouldn’t need to resort to this method though.

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