There are Quality-Settings for the virtual-texturing system that suggest that there are indeed specular and normal-maps, not just diffuse ones. My guess is that those specular and normal-textures are just used very conservatively, and mostly just in indoor areas around certain lightsources for storage reasons. Since the…
1. If the source art is low res to begin with then its going to look low res even when transferred into virtual texture data. 2. When they showed the tools a long time ago all the stamping and stuff was non destructive so changing things could be done without too much work I guess. 3. In the promo builds they probably used…
There were no 16k atlases, you're just confused by the 4k / 8k setting in the options menu. That is the size of a single texture built up of all the 128x128 tiles necessary to render the scene. Can't really find a Rage related image but it's basically a random looking mosaic mess of small pieces of textures; and as you…
Here's a talk, about 20 minutes on the virtual texturing part and a lot about the GPU transcoding part: http://nvidia.fullviewmedia.com/gtc2010/0921-a1-2152.html