id Tech 5 Challenges: Texture Virtualization and Massive Parallelization
id Software senior programmer J.M.P. van Waveren has shown new screenshots of id Tech5 engine and their new technique called virtual texturing which is an unique and very large texture for the whole scene (mega-texturing???):
More technical information can be found in the presentation paper: id_Tech_5_Challenges PDF.
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Prefect transitions if one texture for all !!!
How much GPU mem for this ???
erm, haven’t the flight simulation guys done this for years? Paging of textures in real time is nothing new. Am I missing something?
Yes, very large, paged textures have been used in the professional flight simulation world for many years now. The transition of this capability from very expensive mainframe (e.g. sgi) graphics to PC graphics occurred earlier in the decade as demonstrated by the Vega Prime SDK introduction of Virtual Texture. This announcement by id would appear to be latest example of how gaming technology has advanced to the point it is adopting professional grade simulation/visualization technologies, which is a win-win for both markets.
Curts, thanks for the detailed reply. I just wanted to remind gamers that not everything in graphics was invented in the last 5 years
i can see this working really well if they get it running right on mid to high end graphics cards only one thing i’m concerned about and thats the memory reqirement needed for mega textures