High Performance Texture Streaming and Rendering of Large Textured 3D Cities

We introduce a novel, high performing, bandwidth-aware texture streaming system for progressive texturing of buildings in large 3D cities, with optional texture pre-processing. We seek to maintain high and consistent texture streaming performance across different city datasets, and to address the high memory binding latency in hardware virtual textures. We adopt the sparse partially-resident image to cache mesh textures at runtime and propose to allocate memory persistently, based on mesh visibility weightings and estimated GPU bandwidth. We also retain high quality rendering by minimizing texture pop-ins when transitioning between texture mipmaps. We evaluate our texture streaming system on large city datasets, including a tile-based dataset with 56K large atlases and a dataset containing 5.7M individual textures. Results indicate fast and robust streaming and rendering performance with minimal pop-in artifacts suitable for real-time rendering of large 3D cities.