I've been using the new Cycles Baking branch that Dalai Felinto is working on and have noticed that when adding textures to materials, the render time goes up substantially when the textures are very large such as 2048x2048 or higher.
So basically, for the object to render fast then the textures that are applied to the object must first be scaled down to something more reasonable like 1024x1024.
This breaks the workflow and makes managing textures difficult since having multiple copies of textures at various resolutions can be difficult.
Alright so to the point, I would like to be able to load in large textures but to have Cycles recognize them as smaller than they really are.
Ideally there would be a node that has various texture dimensions which can be specified and connected to the image Texture node but I do not see one.
I think the compositor has something like this but apparently, for now, not Cycles. Does anyone know of a work around that can help with this?