An LRU Approach for the Virtual Texture Management

Modern computer graphics applications need larger and larger texture images for more advanced texture mapping applications. Virtual texturing is a modern texture allocation and management technique especially for a extremely large texture image. The direct benefit with the virtual texturing is that it allows large working texture images, which is larger than the physical video RAM size on the current graphics card. Previous virtual texturing implementations used the simple LRU management scheme, and may get texture tile missing failure. We introduce a new virtual texture management scheme: substitute a set of child MipMap texture nodes with a single parent node, to reduce memory requirements, in spite of a little bit image quality degradation.