Good strategy for many DDS textures as tiles?

Hello.

I’m using another games assets and they have 128x128 pixel DDS “terrain” textures. These can be used in any combination on a map up to 256x256 tiles.

What I currently do is break up the map into “quartiles” and pre-render the sections, eg I might break up the entire map geometry into 4x4 and they each have a single texture I pre-render. The quartile size is determined by MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE. I then merge the geometries and assign the quartile textures to it.

I’m wondering if I’m inadvertently slowing down my first render by doing this. Is there a better / more performant method, perhaps using 2d arrays (can I even do that with dds?) and not pre-rendering the quartiles?

I just a little pointing in the right direction before I dive in.

Thanks for reading ^^