Anatomy of a Texture

I just uploaded a new article describing how a modern video game texture is stored in graphics memory, why it's done this way, and how it may differ between platforms.

It is called Anatomy of a Texture.

Really enjoyed this, refreshing to read something passionate and hand written. I had no idea how much complexity existed in something as innocuous as handling textures between platforms.

Also pretty cool getting a glimpse into the work 505 does helping developers get their games in front of more people. I had no idea 505 was the publisher[0] for so many recognizable titles.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_505_video_games

Really nice article, thanks for writing it! I recently dabbled in some of this in connection with modding a game and there encountered the hierarchy you describe of mips, tiles, blocks and texels, so very relatable. Great write-up!

Why not compress the texture using NTC, VAE-VQ or some neural codec into a general embedding space of uint8 and then just expand and create mipmaps and similar using the target hardware standard?

Fantastic read! Not even a hint of LLMisms.