In the early days of OpenGL and DirectX, it was required that textures were powers of two. This meant that interpolation of float values could be done very quickly using shifting and such.Since OpenGL 2.0, and preceding that via an extension, non-power-of-two texture dimensions has been supported.Are there performance advantages to sticking to power-of-two textures on modern integrated and discrete GPUs?What advantages do non-power-of-two textures have, if any?Are there large populations of desktop users who don’t have cards that support non-power-of-two textures?
ANSWER: (2015)
power of 2 textures increase performance about 30% for any type of GPU not only old GPUs (30% faster is the difference between a high end GPU and an average one) they take 30% more ram but less vram is needed they increase quality by providing proper texture size for specific distance it works like anti-aliasing for textures dark line artifact should be handled by game engines and aaa engines handle them fine
Source: opengl – why would you use textures that are not a power of 2? – Game Development Stack Exchange
