Is there any advantage to Channel Packing for V-Ray GPU like there is for a games engine?

[GidPDX]

Just wondering if channel packing and using images that way will help with RAM and "calls" in V-Ray GPU in any way? Or is it the same as saving out each channel as it's own grey scale image for V-Ray GPU?

[hermit.crab]

Thank you for posting. Currently, V-Ray GPU is not optimized for channel packed textures, so, for now, it is better to use separate grayscale images. However, we do have plans to improve texture handling in future builds and will consider channel packed textures as well. Logging the request for reference purposes (Bug-tracker id: VGPU-4469).

[savage309]

Pretty sure grayscale images are optimized to be single channel regardless of their format type (png, jpeg, etc), so this kind of happen automatically in V-Ray GPU. In this regard, V-Ray GPU does better than game engines as using grayscale doesnt require extra work from artists + you still get the same memory footprint as packing.

If you still want to use channel packing in a texture, you can do that with V-Ray GPU and extract the channel you want using color correction texture (this is in Max, in other host apps there are different procedurals to do that).

Best,
Blago.