I'm wondering, what is the best file format for textures in Karma?
Because recently I've been having some problems right after launching Karma in newly open scenes with like 3 megascans and handful of 8k .exr textures. It nearly stops progressing for anywhere between 30 seconds and 5 minutes. Once it passes this stage however it's all superfast and interactive, like it's supposed to. Then even when I jump to Houdini GL and back to Karma it's all smooth. I can change shader parameters. Anything. No problem.

I had the same problem with .jpg textures. Do I need to convert all my to textures to .rat format or is 8k too much for Karma or what's the deal? Am I missing something? Without textures it's fine, so it's gotta be the textures.

tried the .rat format?
I am hesitant since I have alot of 4k models in the scene.

I posted a way to use TOPs to batch convert files to .rat here: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/84369/?page=1#post-377734 [www.sidefx.com]

Or use HOUDINI_TEXTURE_DISK_CACHE env in houdini 19.5 and have your texture auto converted.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/ref/env.html
]https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/ref/env.html [www.sidefx.com]

Some image formats will have better performance when used as texture maps when rendering. The imaketx program can be used to create these high-performance texture files. This variable controls how non-ideal texture maps should be used for texturing, automatically running imaketex on these images to create high-performance texture files. This conversion is done once, resulting an overall performance increase.

Unset or “native”: will use the raw texture map with no conversion
“local” will create a high performance texture file in the same directory as the source texture (if possible).
“temp” will use a local disk cache to store the high performance texture files. This cache can be controlled using the htexcache command line utility.
“all” will first try to create a local texture file and if that fails, it will fall back to the “temp” disk cache. For example, a texture file $HIP/maps/color.png would have a local texture file created in $HIP/maps/color.rat, but a texture stored in an HDA cannot have a local texture created, so a cached file would be created in the temp disk cache.

will this make the engine automatically choose the .rat file or do I have to manually assign these new textures on the principled shader?