non-square POT texture support and performance

Hi.

Can anyone make a definite assertion on what the first generation of GPUs is that supports non-square POT textures flawlessly? EDIT: With “supported” I mean that they are not being made square internally and that non-square mip-maps are possible.

Also are there any performance implications when considering textures of the size 256*4096 for example?

Thanks for your input.

I don’t know anything about first generation GPUs.
This one supports 1024 x 1024 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIVA_TNT but there is no talk about non-square textures.

256*4096? I guess it depends on how you map it to a triangle. Obviously, the smaller the texture, the better the performance due to texture cache usage patterns. As always, use mipmaps for best performance no matter what the texture level 0 size is.

Can anyone make a definite assertion on what the first generation of GPUs is that supports non-square POT textures flawlessly?

All of them, I think. Certainly all of the NVIDIA ones. The earliest 3DFx cards may not have had this, but by the days of the TNT, you can probably assume that non-square textures were available.

Also are there any performance implications when considering textures of the size 256*4096 for example?

Besides the memory that it takes up? No. Nothing that you should concern yourself with.