GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation

Chapter 12. Tile-Based Texture Mapping

Li-Yi WeiNVIDIA Corporation

Many graphics applications such as games and simulations frequently use large textures for walls, floors, or terrain. There are several issues with large textures. First, they can consume significant storage, in either disk space, system memory, or graphics memory. Second, they can consume significant bandwidth, during either initial texture loading or rendering. Third, most graphics cards impose an upper limit on individual texture sizes. For example, the GeForce 6800 has an upper resolution limit of 4,096×4,096 for RGBA8 textures, and many other GPUs have stricter limitations.

One possible solution to address these problems is texture compression. However, existing GPU texture-compression ...