Virtual Texture Mapping 101

International audienceModern games and applications use large amounts of texture data; the number and the resolution of textures also continues to grow quickly. However, the amount of available graphics memory is not growing at the same pace and, in addition to textures, GPU memory is also used for complex post-processing effects and lighting calculations. Virtual Texture Mapping (VTM) is a technique to reduce the amount of graphics memory required for textures to a point where it is only dependent on the screen resolution: for a given viewpoint we only keep the visible parts of the textures in graphics memory, at the appropriate MIP map level. In this chapter, we investigate how to implement a fully functional VTM system