Simon F said:IIRC, I've read that the typical (Pixar) Movie Renderman frames may also access 100s of Megabytes of texture data.
Can't see textures going away anytime in the next few years.
That is correct. We have several 8K texture pages for our characters right now, and each have at least color, displacement, specular layers... And it's still not for movie production. My pal working at MPC, UK had to work with hundreds (!) of 2K maps for a single object recently.
Pixar's Renderman is actually heavily optimized for textures, they have automatic MIP-mapping and lazy loading, for example.
Also, just think about it... how else would you color vertices, that are only generated at rendertime from a higher order surface? The whole point of using subdivs or NURBS is that there's less data to pass through the pipeline, from modeling through UV mapping through skinning through occlusion culling etc. Textures are a MUST.