How to measure whether your assets are consistent - and catch the ones that aren't before they ship.
What Is Texel Density?
Texel density measures how many texels map to one unit of real-world surface area. It's the consistency metric that ensures assets read correctly relative to each other at the same distance - if a wall has 10 texels per centimeter and a crate next to it has 2, the crate will look blurry by comparison even at the same resolution.
Why does it matter?
Higher texel density doesn't automatically mean better quality. There's a ceiling set by how many pixels the asset actually occupies on screen. A cup in a third-person game might only cover a small region of the viewport regardless of how dense its texture is - forcing a higher mip doesn't recover detail, it just introduces aliasing. The texture is already resolving finer than the screen can show.
The budget argument compounds this. Standardizing at an unnecessarily high texel density bloats texture memory and file sizes across every asset in the project. Large textures that stay resident in VRAM have a direct cost on GPU performance. Getting texel density right is about matching the resolution of your textures to what the game can actually use - not maximizing it.
Formula
def CalculateTexelDensity(inMesh, inWidth, inHeight):
return sqrt(
sum(GetUVArea(inMesh) * (inHeight * inWidth)) /
sum(GetSurfaceAreas(inMesh)))
Where:
- GetUVArea - UV area of the mesh in UV space (0-1 range)
- inWidth / inHeight - texture resolution
- GetSurfaceAreas - world-space surface area of the mesh
© 2026 Stefan Groenewoud - All views are my own, not those of my employer.