Why a 1024x1024 Texture Is a Memory Maze
Anatomy of a Texture
Porting a PC game engine to consoles forced me to confront the hidden complexity of texture memory layouts. Block compression, texel ordering, mips, and texture tiles all complicate the naive row-by-row view. Using a 1024x1024 BC7 texture as an example, I explain the hierarchy of building blocks and why each platform arranges them differently, turning texture conversion into a debugging nightmare of memory addresses.
I seriously underestimated the complexity of texture memory layouts.
- taylor-tg
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.
- essai57
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!
- augment_me
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?