Software Texture Management
The most difficult part of many applications
- Textures must be resident on graphics card for maximum performance
- 8 texels accessed per drawn pixel for mip-mapped textures
- 125Mpixel/sec output needs ~4GB/s of memory bandwidth consumed in reading texel data
- AGP 4X is only ~1GB/s
- Managing textures in a finite graphics memory is a hard problem
- Severe 2D fragmentation wastes memory space
- Garbage collection can result in texture thrashing - throw out textures that are needed
- Multiple applications may be fighting for texture space
- The application can only manage complete textures
- It cannot know which texels are being accessed
- Once one texel is accessed - must download the whole texture bitmap
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