@archo Yeah but at sensible resolutions, the higher-rez textures will never be loaded. So all they're wasting is disk space and their own production time. Whereas PBR is burning my precious DRAM for minor LSB differences. Boooooo.

(I say this with honest love to all my PBR shader writers)

(it's a joke. This is a bit)

(or is it)

@TomF Texture loading time from disk and download time/bandwidth would be wasted as well, which seems relevant with modern 150 GB games. (Also not a lot of such games fit on 1 TB consoles.)

But I suspect for high res textures there could be a way to stream the biggest mips on-demand from the CDN to the GPU based on what the GPU needs which AFAIK nobody's doing yet. PBR seems uniquely disadvantaged in this regard (but at least the number of parameters doesn't seem to be growing infinitely).

@dotstdy @TomF IIRC there was also some software that used a virtual file system to download Steam game files on-demand (I forgot the name), which together with local mip streaming from separate files would work similarly.

The part I was specifically thinking nobody's done yet was detecting which mips are actually being requested by the pixel shader. It seems this wasn't mentioned in the video but I'm curious if they've been experimenting with something like that as well.

@archo @dotstdy It's called "virtual texturing" and it's been tried many ways over the years. My favourite talk is this one by Sean Barrett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MejJL87yNgI

Also called "megatextures" and implemented in the "id Tech 5" engine and used in a bunch of games, most notably Rage.

I don't remember if it's persisted in newer engines like UE5. There's a certain overhead to using it, and I think most of the time analytic solutions are just as effective and cheaper e.g. https://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BKnowing%20which%20mipmap%20levels%20are%20needed%5D%5D