Partial mipmap generation for texture memory bandwidth saving

Abstract

Texture mapping is commonly used to make scenes realistic in the most current graphics systems. Texture mapping, however, requires high memory bandwidth and low memory latency to obtain good performance. A few studies have been carried out to use cache memory system in texture mapping in order to overcome these problems and those studies show that cache is useful for texture mapping. And a few studies about texture compression shows that texture compression is useful in bandwidth saving. There are a few texture filtering methods. Among them trilinear filtering of mipmapped texture can make the rendered scene most realistic but it requires highest memory bandwidth. In this paper the methods reducing the memory bandwidth required by trilinear filtering is proposed. Trilinear filtering requires eight texels in two adjacent mipmap images per one pixel on texture mapping. Any mipmap image except mipmap image of lowest level is constructed from the mipmap image of lower adjacent level. Partial mipmap generation using these characteristics can make bandwidth required for texture mapping lower. And the effect of partial mipmap generation can increase the throughput of the texture cache.