scenes cover vast open spaces; since the system does
not discriminate texture tiles by view distance, a large
number of distant tiles that occupy a relatively small
area of the image plane may quickly fill the physi-
cal texture. If the physical texture size is limited (as
would be the case with memory-limited devices), a
single view may end up requiring a number of tiles
larger than the capacity of the physical texture, caus-
ing the system to start thrashing. A problem that is
also closely tied to an overburdened physical texture
is that of lack of fairness in tile selection; in some
cases, it may be possible for the system to consistently
fail to fully construct a view, essentially starving parts
of the megatexture. This is because there is no mech-
anism in place to guarantee that a tile that is in view
will eventually find its place in the physical texture
when the latter’s size is constrained. Thus, the next
evolution for DARM is that of providing a multi-level
physical texture, taking advantage of a tile’s distance
from the observer and thus reducing its area and trans-
fer footprint. This would also mitigate the problem
with tile selection fairness. We would also like to in-
vestigate a multi-level coarse megatexture and reduce
the seams that sometimes appear when the latter is
used.
In terms of system architecture and implementa-
tion, we would like to rewrite server updates, replac-
ing TCP by RTP over UDP, for a more streamlined
and performant approach. Furthermore, not all parts
of DARM are optimised to make full use of paral-
lelism where available; for instance, the population
of the physical texture is still executed as a sequen-
tial process and can easily benefit from parallelisa-
tion. Finally, even though the response lag experi-
enced through the system is minimal, we would like
to devise a test to accurately measure input and out-
put lag (how shading carried out by the remote server
appears to trail geometry updates carried out locally),
both objectively and perceptually.
REFERENCES
Barrett, S. (2008). Sparse Virtual Textures. In Talk at Game
Developers Conference.
Carr, N. A. and Hart, J. C. (2002). Meshed Atlases for Real-
Time Procedural Solid Texturing. ACM Transactions
on Graphics (TOG), 21(2):106–131.
Hladky, J., Seidel, H.-P., and Steinberger, M. (2019). Tes-
sellated Shading Streaming. Computer Graphics Fo-
rum.
Hollemeersch, C., Pieters, B., Lambert, P., and Van de
Walle, R. (2010). Accelerating Virtual Texturing us-
ing CUDA. GPU Pro: Advanced Rendering Tech-
niques, 1:623–641.
L
´
evy, B., Petitjean, S., Ray, N., and Maillot, J. (2002). Least
Squares Conformal Maps for Automatic Texture At-
las Generation. In ACM Transactions on Graphics
(TOG), volume 21, pages 362–371. ACM.
Mittring, M. et al. (2008). Advanced Virtual Texture Top-
ics. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 Games, pages 23–51.
ACM.
Mueller, J. H., Voglreiter, P., Dokter, M., Neff, T., Makar,
M., Steinberger, M., and Schmalstieg, D. (2018).
Shading Atlas Streaming. In SIGGRAPH Asia 2018
Technical Papers, page 199. ACM.
Obert, J., van Waveren, J., and Sellers, G. (2012). Virtual
Texturing in Software and Hardware. In ACM SIG-
GRAPH 2012 Courses, page 5. ACM.
Ray, N., Nivoliers, V., Lefebvre, S., and L
´
evy, B. (2010).
Invisible Seams. In Computer Graphics Forum, vol-
ume 29, pages 1489–1496. Wiley Online Library.
Tanner, C. C., Migdal, C. J., and Jones, M. T. (1998). The
Clipmap: A Virtual Mipmap. In Proceedings of the
25th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and
Interactive Techniques, pages 151–158. ACM.
van Waveren, J. (2009). id Tech 5 Challenges - From Tex-
ture Virtualization to Massive Parallelization. Talk in
Beyond Programmable Shading course, SIGGRAPH,
9:5.
van Waveren, J. (2012). Software Virtual Textures.
GRAPP 2020 - 15th International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications
262