(Historical) Hardware Support for Large Texture Maps

This page describes the (now mostly historical) challenge of supporting large textures on early hardware (roughly 1994-2008).  In the modern era of graphics cards with gigabytes of texture RAM and fast busses for instantaneous paging, is is largely a non-issue.

SGI

Ways to Save Texture Memory

3D Card Vendors

Traditional High-end PC Graphics Card Vendors

See Older/Historical Cards.

RAM requirements for a single texture, in megabytes, with and without mipmapping (MM):

size of texture 16 bit 24 bit 32 bit 16 bit w/MM 24 bit w/MM 32 bit w/MM 24 bit with 4x
Compression
(may be greater due to rounding up to meet texture memory usage constraints)
1024*1024 2 3 4 2.7 4 5.5 0.75
2048*2048 8 12 16 10.9 16 21.3 3
4096*4096 32 48 64 42.6 64 85.3 12
8192*8192 128 192 256 170.6 256 341.3 48
16384*16384 512 768 1024   1024   256

Card/Chipset Maximum Texture Size under OpenGL, Current Cards:

Chipset Max texture RAM (MB) Max Texture Size
NVidia GeForce series ~110/240 (128/256 on card) 4096
ATI Radeon series ~110/240 (128/256 on card) 2048