In a scene where there will be images with transparency, and images without, is there a downside to creating them all as RGBA? Or is RGBA totally unnecessary if one of the RGB colors (say black) is designated as the color to be made transparent?
Thanks.
RGBA will end up being 32 bit (8bits per channel) unless you specifically ask for 5551 format. RGB may end up as 565 or 888 depending on what the driver feels like doing. But while the 565 will take up 16bits per texel you’ll get 888 format textures padded to 32bits, so you might as well go for RGBA in that case.
Although bear in mind theres no easy way to do colour keying, so if you want all black pixels to be transparent you’ll end up converting to RGBA format anyway. Its probably easiest to go for RGBA most of the time unless you’ve got a specific reason not to.
Thank you sir 