Progressive Texture Streaming

Abstract

Since its conception, the increasing need for graphical detail has been a driving factor for the gaming industry. The 3D scenes rendered in modern games have increased in detail and scale at a rapid rate, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The ever-increasing processing power and the development of faster 3D rendering hardware has enabled game developers to present the player with large, densely populated 3D virtual worlds containing thousands of high resolution textures and models. In order to render these virtual worlds on current gaming hardware, texture streaming is quickly becoming a necessity: the current gaming consoles cannot contain all texture data of a game world within their graphical memory. The proposed texture streaming solution addresses this problem by managing the texture data between the optical media and graphical memory at run-time. This thesis details a progressive, mipmap aware texture streaming scheme, designed around the optical media used by the current generation of gaming consoles. In the proposed solution, bandwidth usage is reduced by progressively streaming textures through a DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform)-based compression scheme. Seek time of the optical media is reduced by employing a spacial packing scheme which aims to minimize the amount of separate read operations. Using these tools, textures can be accessed and streamed in various levels of detail, providing an efficient use of memory while keeping bandwidth usage and seek times at a minimum.Computer Graphics and CAD/CAMElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc