The Forge has now support for Sparse Virtual Textures on Windows and Linux with DirectX 12 / Vulkan. Sparse texture (also known as "virtual texture", “tiled texture”, or “mega-texture”) is a technique to load huge size (such as 16k x 16k or more) textures in GPU memory.
It breaks an original texture down into small square or rectangular tiles to load only visible part of them.
The unit test 18_Virtual_Texture is using 7 sparse textures:
- Mercury: 8192 x 4096
- Venus: 8192 x 4096
- Earth: 8192 x 4096
- Moon: 16384 x 8192
- Mars: 8192 x 4096
- Jupiter: 4096 x 2048
- Saturn: 4096 x 4096
There is a unit test that shows a solar system where you can approach planets with Sparse Virtual Textures attached and the resolution of the texture will increase when you approach.
Linux 1080p NVIDIA RTX 2060 Vulkan Driver version 435
Windows 10 1080p AMD RX550 DirectX 12 Driver number: Adrenaline software 19.10.1
Windows 10 1080p NVIDIA 1080 Vulkan Driver number: 418.81
Ephemeris 2 - the game Stormland from Insomniac was released. This game is using a custom version of Ephemeris 2. We worked for more than six months on this project.
Head over to Custom Middleware to check out the source code.