John Carmack’s idea might be utilised again.

Carmack, back when he worked at id Software, created the MegaTexture rendering technology for the id Tech 4 engine, which allowed a 32768×32768 pixel texture to cover the entire polygon map, resulting in unique textures without repeated tiles. (It was  memorable in 2011’s RAGE – the last game Carmack worked on at id Software, but here, the id Tech 5 engine allowed 128Kx128K pixel textures.)

„Some techniques like Quake Wars’megatextures could resurface. Megatextures, also known as Partially Resident Textures, allow every object of the game to have its own unique set of textures, leading to richer, more varied and less repetitive visuals. To achieve this effect the engine constantly streams in and out the texture fragments it needs to render what is on screen and caches it. How fast the data can be streamed in is vital for such a system to work.

In previous generations, it required a lot of very bespoke optimisation, but things could simplify drastically with faster drives. It’s interesting to see that both hardware vendors such as NVIDIA or AMD as well as Epic Games (Unreal Engine) have been doing work in this area lately,” Marc Fascia, Splash Damage’s vice president of technology, told MCVUK (quoted by WCCFTech).

However, id Software doesn’t seem to be interested in going back to this idea. Marty Stratton, the executive producer of DOOM Eternal (that recently got Denuvo Anti-Cheat, making a lot of PC players angry, we discussed this separately), said the following shortly before the game’s launch: „We completed the departure from Megatextures, which allowed us to do more instance geometry, more instance texture tiling textures, which also allowed us to have higher fidelity texture. So for the first time, I would say we’ve gotten away from that. I think in the last several games, you could criticize our texture fidelity to be a little blurry. And I think DOOM Eternal is the first one where we are again at the top of the heap when it comes to texture fidelity.”

Still, the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X, both planned to launch this Holiday season, could have good use of this technology, as both are touting high-speed SSDs.

Source: WCCFTech

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