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Does anyone have experience with virtual textures?

gnoop
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gnoop sublime tool
Those huge ones  that allow to load   only a part at a time ? I wonder how big you go and what texel size  you are using with them. And  what method to create them do you use?   Are they really that quick on modern hardware?

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  • Eric Chadwick
  • gnoop
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    gnoop sublime tool
  • poopipe
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    poopipe grand marshal polycounter


    Authoring wise - they're just textures...


    With unreal they work fine on current gen consoles and were usable on PS4/xbone but you had to be very careful how you schedule updates due to a lack of memory bandwidth.

    Outside of unreal the tech is called sampler feedback  and depends on direct storage (and I think bindless resources) to function.  I posted a link to a Microsoft presentation about it recently. 

    The primary benefits are that you basically don't have to worry about static memory footprint for textures and you that don't have to limit the size of your top mips. 
    The caveats are that there's overhead attached and you need certain systems in place that are non-trivial to implement. 



  • gnoop
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    gnoop sublime tool
    poopipe   thanks  for the comment .  We don't use  Unreal.   I am still not sure I understand it completely . How would it work in a PC game for example ?   Would those huge textures  need to be stored in system RAM , while loading parts to vidocard on the fly ?    Isn't it going to give some micro fps drops ?   Or not anymore with  modern videocards? 
  • poopipe
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    poopipe grand marshal polycounter
     like any streaming system it's ultimately pulling stuff off your hdd while holding useful mips in a cache. 

    The difference is that it loads parts of textures, not the whole thing  

    We had to do a fair bit of balancing and tweaking to avoid issues with the time taken to update the list of 'tiles' we loaded on PS4 and xbone because they had so little memory bandwidth - gen 9 consoles and pc were much more forgiving 
    We've shipped non-unreal titles with this tech on gen9 and it's been fine. 

    In essence you're concerned about the right sort of thing but I don't think you need to be unduly concerned 
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