Real-Time Visualization of Virtual Huge Texture

Huge texture is an important component in many civil and military simulations. These textures are often too large to fit into video memory, even system memory, causing a bottleneck. In this paper, we present an efficient large texture management technique which is inspired by clip map. The clipmap algorithm caches a subset of the texture mipmap pyramid in video memory and updates incrementally based on toroidal mapping. To date, it is not supported on most GPU. We provide an approach to implement it on the latest generation of commodity GPUs using programmable shaders, and has some supplement or improvement in data organization, rendering quality, efficiency, etc. The experiment shows the high efficient and high quality of this algorithm by visualizing a 2¹⁶ times 2¹⁵ virtual texture.