Are 1024 textures supposed to be bad?
What matters is not the resolution of each texture but the total amount of pixels of all textures in the scene. As a general rule 250 million pixels in a scene (including avatars!) is reasonably safe for even fairly low spec computers to render although it may take quite a while to download it all at first. Any game computer should be able to handle a billion pixels without any problems. With 4-5 billions or more pixels, even high end game powerhouses may run into problems.
A 1024x1024 has about a million pixels (1,048,576 to be exact). A 512x512 has about a quarter of a million and a 256x256 65,536.
As for bandwidth and load time, all textures that aren't already cached have to be downloaded from a server of course. How much time that takes, depends on the client's internet connection speed. According to BroadbandNow (
What is a Good Internet Speed and How Much Do I Need? | BroadbandNow.com ) average bandwidth these days is 100 Mps which translates to 5-6 1024x0124 textures or 20-30 512x5125 ones per second.
It's not at all unusual for an SL scene to have thousands of textures, especially if there are several avatars there. If they are all 1024s, you're asking for trouble and with that kind of numbers even an average resolution of 512x512 is too much. But a handful of 1024x isn't going to make much of a difference.
But I found a 1024 texture looked a hell of a lot better on the platforms I made for my land than lower resolution ones.
This depends as much on the skills of the texture creator and the software used. I always work with high resolution textures and use paint.net, not Gimp or Photoshop to scale them down before I upload. The reason is that paint.net supports the FANT scaling algorithm which tends to give a much sharper result than the standard bicubic and bilinear algorithms you are stuck with if you use the other common image editors.
I didn't have to tile it, or fiddle with repeats per meter, etc.
It's a shame that tiled textures have been so much abused and gained such a bad reputation in SL. Good moderate resolution tiled textures with not too high repeat rates, not too obvious artifacts and maybe some carefully made manual shadings can look every bit as good as higher resolution none repeating ones that have been run through Blender's auto-bakefail functions.
