“The clipmap: a virtual mipmap” by Tanner, Migdal and Jones

We describe the clipmap, a dynamic texture representation that efficiently caches textures of arbitrarily large size in a finite amount of physical memory for rendering at real-time rates. Further, we describe a software system for managing clipmaps that supports integration into demanding real-time applications. We show the scale and robustness of this integrated hardware/software architecture by reviewing an application virtualizing a 170 gigabyte texture at 60 Hertz. Finally, we suggest ways that other rendering systems may exploit the concepts underlying clipmaps to solve related problems.

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