MegaTexture
More info
- Creator
- John Carmack (id Software)
- Released
- 2007
- Type
- Virtual texturing
- Successor
- Virtual texturing
id Software's technique of clothing an entire game world in a single giant, unique texture streamed in small tiles — no more repeating tiles, but infamous for its texture pop.
Traditionally the same texture is tiled across large surfaces, with a visibly repeating pattern. MegaTexture inverted that: one enormous texture, tens of thousands of pixels square, covers the whole landscape uniquely, and the hardware streams in just the pieces in view. id Tech 4 used it for the terrain of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (2007); id Tech 5 extended it to everything in Rage (2011).
The idea was right but bandwidth couldn't keep up: Rage became as famous for visible texture pop, where surfaces loaded their detail half a second too late. It was an early, proprietary form of what is now called virtual texturing.