Spatial Binning on the GPU
Christopher Oat, Joshua Barczak, Jeremy Shopf · 2010
For a long time games have used textures to add surface details and diversity to their virtual worlds. These textures usually consist of a basic set of different surface appearances which are then composed at runtime by shaders to calculate the final surface appearance. Recently there has been an increased interest in virtual texturing technologies [Barrett 08, Lefebre et al. 04,Mittring 08]. Virtual texturing allows very large textures (in the order of one gigapixel) to be applied to the game’s geometry while still remaining within the limits of today’s hardware. This allows far more varied worlds than can be achieved with composing tiling textures at a lower or comparable render cost.