Most under-used 'modern' feature: 3D texture maps?

[JohnH]

I was thinking that part of the page description for each texture could contain information wrt scaling, compression etc. I think the only issue is that you might want a smaller page size than you get in a typical system tlb, although there are ways around that...

Can you upload partial textures/mipmaps though? (And is the virtual memory system flexible enough to allow void parts?) If not big sparse textures (think 1024^3 3D textures) would still present a huge problem, even if you could virtualize unused parts all the way back to the HD via system virtual memory after loading (can you do that?).

If its done as a true page based system you only load the pages that you access, but yep, I guess sparse access could still present a problem, although you can always page out again. The paging of data in and out of disk is more of a OS issue. I have looked at the idea of the driver maintaining its own private paging file, but without OS support there's some minor issues to sort out.

John

 

[MfA]

The paging of data in and out of disk is more of a OS issue.John

Does windows really page out texture data? (I dont know too much about it, I considered the possibility of windows being able to get exceptions from the GART to page in data ... but thought it unlikely.)

BTW without API support it would be a really ugly hack to code the approach I mentioned tailor made for a given architecture's virtual addressing system

 

[Humus]

How about we get 4D textures implemented

GL_SGIS_texture4D

 

[MfA]

An excercise in futility.

 

[Dio]

I'm surprised it's not GL_INFINEON_texture_4D

 

[Humus]

An excercise in futility.

Nah. Wouldn't it take so much memory it would actually be quite useful in a number of situations. Animated 3d noise for instance.

Heck, with 128x128x128x16 you're "only" taking 32MB, well, that's quite a lot, but still realistic for use. You're not going to need many of them.

 

[MfA]

If you have to support filtering it is already too much extra hardware for too little gain, if you dont then it would almost certainly just be handled by some pixel shader microcode ... might as well let the developer do that himself.