I have no idea what you're talking about but this is very well made.

Fascinating topic! I've only ever heard about these techniques in the context of raytracing but using them for a voxel engine makes so much sense. (Btw, love the visualizations in your video)

*Corrections and Notes* (thanks for putting up with me ♥) - People have informed me that "we're back to ground zero" is a malaphor, and the actual phrase is "we're back to square one". I looked this up and it's actually a pretty widespread phenomena. Is this a mistake, or just language becoming weirder and weirder as we all stumble deeper into insanity? I'll let you decide... - I swapped really abruptly between talking about video memory and bind slots, which might be confusing to some people. Bind slots are not related to video memory, they are effectively a place that you input a texture that already exists in memory to be used for rendering. These slots only really exist in software, limitations are imposed on them by the graphics APIs, not the physical hardware of the card. Video memory, on the other hand, is the stuff that actually stores the texture, which is physically limited by the design of the card. - Some people wished I was more clear that these tips were directed at OpenGL specifically. That's very fair! I have a habit of forgetting how different other graphics APIs are. Vulkan doesn't have the same issues with Bind Slots that OpenGL has, and thus does not need Bindless or Array textures. However, it does, from my understanding, have an understanding of Sparse Textures. It also can benefit from Texture Compression & Vertex Optimization, although the texture compression algorithms might differ, I'm not too sure. As for DirectX, I do not care. Windows specific graphics API bad

I liked this video! Good presentation, very easy to understand. It may be worth emphasising the "OpenGLness" of both the problem and solution with regards to binding large numbers of textures. Most AAA games use DX12 or Vulkan which handle all the texture book keeping with descriptor sets (kinda already bindless). You might enjoy Faith Ekstrand's "descriptors are hard" blog post - she's a Linux Vulkan driver developer.

I always love to see how magnificent works of art work under the hood, even though I have barely a grip on the exact science. This video made me connect a lot of computer science dots, especially in graphics processing! Thank you so much for this!

It makes me happy more informational and educational videos on graphics rendering have started popping up since the whole Unity implosion. Your videos are good. Especially enjoyed the animations. They were fun and underlined your points really well. Keep it up!

In the very recently released Unreal Engine 5.4, there's an improvement referred to as "RHI - Bindless Rendering (Experimental)" which is essentially what this video talks about, which is something I didn't know about. I'm not sure if it's the algorithm being spot on or just sheer luck but I was shown this video just today. Subbed!

Im so happy to have found this channel, when I was younger and tried to delve deeper in this kind of topic, it was really hard to find information that was begginer friendly. Now this niche part of youtube is more active and growing a lot. I hope to be contributing soon too. Good work!

Very interesting video. I remember when id first implemented (on software) virtual textures on rage, and then some years ago I read about when they added bindless textures to OpenGL, but never I listened to a simple description why it's so important to have the bindless textures. I thought that was only for performance. Great video.

Ooh, your channel is gonna blow up! I loved this, it was extremely informative. Also, your outro is beautiful!

Cool, a few years ago I stumbled onto bindless textures while checking out the RTX samples by Nvidia and I already knew about texture arrays but never about sparse textures, that’s so cool. I wish I had discovered your channel earlier, subscribing now.

i love your video editing style so much its so fun!!! very cool visualisations, ive done engine graphics programming but i had no idea about some of these features, thanks so much!! 💞

I cannot believe I stumbled upon a gem of a creator like you at the beginning of you channel. Keep up the good work, you WILL SUCCEED! You are a inspiration congratulations ahead of time.

This is so useful! I don't know why KZfaq decided to grace me by suggesting this video, but you just gained yourself subscriber 144!

I randomly stumbled upon your twitch channel at the beginning of ludum dare, asked you a question and you were so polite and immediately helped me out. Now I see you won 2nd place for Ludum Dare, that's insane! And this video is full of such incredibly high quality golden nuggets. You are extremely talented, I'm wishing you all the best on your journey!

Such a fantastic video, I couldn't really believe my eyes when I saw you only have 400 subs... Great production value! Have one more subscriber. 🔔

Great video! I have no practical use for this knowledge currently, but it's presentation is great! Wish there was more content like this every time I want to dive into some specific techniques.

Woah, how do u have only 500 subs wtf. This is too well made for a channel this size. Very interesting topic. Looking forward to more of your vids.

This video is so good I couldn't tell it was your first attempt at this format. Great job. Also I'm surprised that it showed up on my home feed given you don't have many subs and views. Only thing I'd like to point out is to maybe look more closely at the audio mix as there are some obvious seams and the volume is swinging up and down between cuts. Other than that it feels great to me

This was exactly the information I needed! Thank you for the thorough walk-through and pedagogical format! This video is awesome :)

Woah, this was in depth! I'm not working on implementing anything like this myself right now, but if i had more time, I'd like to grind out a custom engine with opengl for device compatibility, and i'll definitely be following your channel for more insights like this when i get there. I'd like to see more about your game, too!

this was awesome! im excited to see what you make in the future!

Even though I am just a simple designer turned Unreal Developer, this is still way over my head. Still, it's very interesting and I love getting into those nerdy details... for one day I may understand them myself. 😁

I had no idea that storing textures was this complicated but this was really nice and informative :D

I can't wait to see your other videos, keep up the amazing work. You deserved a sub!

Excellent video! Please don't stop

You make really good content and I look forward to seeing more of your stuff!

Nothing to add, except to say, please make more of these!

I've worked with all of this techniques. I didn't expect so much insight from the video. Information about this topics usually is kind of dull and limited. However, the explanations are just brilliant, great job.

This is an incredible overview, subscribed for sure

Very good presentation. Thanks a lot.

Amazing and so valuable!

nice video. i also make a voxel game with opengl and C nowadays. i think that's why yt recommended your video :) and i am a computer engineering student too. i implemented batch rendering recently. if i have a problem with textures i will watch this precious video again carefully :)

Very informative video, thank you!

Great video, especially for your first educational video! A few things I'd like to point out... I'm guessing you probably haven't run into this due to the size of your textures, but just FYI, hardware sparse textures are very rarely used in big games, specifically because binding the pages is INSANELY slow on Windows due to issues with WDDM. There may have been improvements to this Windows 11 (haven't tried it myself in several years), but as of the last time I checked, it was still effectively useless for the texture sizes you'd see in modern AAA games. Pixel art is likely small enough that it wouldn't be noticeable, though, and on Linux, it's a non-issue AFAIK. For a long time, it was relatively common to do software virtual textures - you may recognize the term "megatextures" from idTech - where individual textures were replaced with page indirection textures that referenced NxN blocks of texture memory in physical atlases (often with some padding so that hardware texture filtering can be used, as you noted for classic atlases, but some implementations just do manual texture filtering). This was initially done because hardware didn't support proper virtual memory (megatextures were first implemented on the Xbox 360 iirc, which came out in 2005 lol), but continued (and continue) to be used because of the slowness of hardware sparse textures on Windows. SVT is typically paired with a readback system wherein a render target is generated during rendering that tells the CPU which texture pages need to be loaded in, which is why games like RAGE and DOOM 2016 have a lot of subtle texture pop-in - you can only load the correct pages a frame after they're needed at the earliest. Nowadays, though, most games just go bindless and stream in progressively higher resolution mip levels depending on some heuristic like distance. SVTs are supported in many off the shelf engines these days, and they're not too bad to implement yourself if you take the time to understand what they're doing. Some games use them in highly specialized ways - for example, Battlefield and some of the Far Cry games use SVTs that are generated on the fly on the GPU to optimize highly detailed terrain rendering with tons of decals basically for free - whereas others use them in more or less the same way as you currently are using hardware sparse textures. I've actually been meaning to use them as the foundation of a procedural texturing system for my own game engine for a few years, where a visibility buffer would be used to determine which pages are needed, then a series of compute shaders are dispatched to generate the necessary pages/garbage collect unneeded pages, but yeknow... free time lol. One more thing - DXTn are sort of antiquated these days. BCn work on the same principle of lossy block compression, but some can achieve a higher quality:size ratio (BC1-3 is effectively the same as DXT1/3/5 iirc, but other BC formats, such as BC7, are much more complex). There are other formats as well, especially on mobile, but I mostly just wanted to point out that DXT is no longer the state of the art and hasn't been for quite some time. I'd encourage you to read up on how the block based formats work if you haven't already - it's fairly simple, but I remember finding them quite clever when I was learning about them :P It's also generally worth doing texture compression offline imo as offline tools typically achieve a higher quality than your OpenGL driver will (and because there's overhead to doing it at runtime), but doing it in-driver can certainly be good enough. There are also formats like basis universal that can be efficiently transcoded at runtime into a variety of different GPU compression formats, which can be useful if you're looking to target multiple platforms. Some SVT implementations, such as that of Far Cry's terrain, actually do block compression in GPU compute live while filling the physical texture, and there are some freely available code snippets you can find online for how to do so.

Really great info!

these visualizers helped a Lot even for someone who struggles with programming logic, big props

Good job! This is going to be such a great resource for the next person looking into this. Great animations and your personality shines through. I'm looking forward to seeing what you make next

great work ! you deserve way more viewer !

Fascinating topic and great presentation! As an amateur gamedev I am always glad to have things demystified about what is actually going on in a computer. Makes it all feel less daunting.

You remind me of StyroPyro with how you present information; but with programming. This is exactly what I've looked for

Very interesting video. I've learned a lot.

Great video, very informative 👍👍 Thanks!

You dropped this 👑

Good job on the video!

This makes me want to get back into voxel engine development. Its almost 10y ago I worked on it. Learning about ADZO and sparse memory allocation on the GPU. Even wrote a tutorial on how to setup and use a modern OpenGL 4.5 context. It was just before when Vulcan released. Compute shaders were not flexible enough to do what I needed for a sparse voxel octree rendering. Your voxel engine looks really cool.

thanks for making this video :)

wonderful video good mix of educational and entertaining, i like seeing practical examples so that would be my only improvement

I'm really new at optimization... so I can see myself rewatching this a 100 times while glancing at the extra google tab to actually understand what ur talking about... but I love it!! :) out of total ignorance on my part, how is this implemented in engine? or, do u know of a link that could maybe show how this works in practical terms inside UE5? thnk u for making it fun and informative! keep the education coming!! :)

this is so good! how do you only have 100 subs!?

Cool video :) very informative

Thank you so much for making this. Please make more. There’s a shortage people making this kinda of content. It would great for you to join SimonDev and Acerola!

Your game is looking verry pretty, good luck!

Great video! Wish we could do bindless in Unity but they seem to be not interested atm 😔 Was surprised to see such a well produced piece of content for such a small channel. Keep it up! ♥

very nice video 👍

you are so cool, i hope i make stuff like this one day!! :3

Oh....so that's why that Minecraft resource pack I like using loses so many frames. lol Thanks for making a video explaining this stuff.

I dunno if this would be relevant or interesting to you, but I'd enjoy a video covering old texturing techniques like how the og Unreal game did it w those close up texture blends n stuff. The evolution of texture tech would also be interesting to go over, like the evolution of bump mapping n all that stuff up to whatever the hell the UE5 is actually doing.

Very intresting, did not know that you can just use textures on the graphics cards without texture slot, btw great video, at the quality level of a big channel/

I really need to start making videos about optimization. I forgot how scattered the information was on this topic until you pointed it out. I have a hobby in just fiddling around with optimization for games. There are quite a few. Also textures can be interesting for optimization. Say you have a few textures on a Texture Atlas for example. If multiple parts of textures on your atlas actually match each other you can use a mapping piece of code to shrink the images into the matching shapes and have it realign the pieces like a puzzle back into the original texture. This is an old technique that has not been used too often because of having to get custom code to work nicely with the engine but these days it should be possible for AI to accomplish this task even quicker. Another way to optimize is to use Steganography, the art of hiding two different digital images inside of each other. However it can be used differently in our case because one texture atlas can become 4 with this method by splitting the image into each RGBA channels and once filled you then take them into a grayscale filter and then re-colorize the textures in the game engine. This method also can be used for every type of mapping system you need. The downside of using this is that once you’ve saved your image you cannot edit the saved file in any way other than temporary file compression. Once the image is made you can’t mess with it because it will ruin the textures and blur them together or worse lock together the channels into a single image. So save and hold onto the editing file for future changes to the Atlas. Combine these with the methods you mentioned and you will have much more textures to work with.

Good content, so here's some engagement.... Keep it coming...

Cool video. What engine you using? Also it would be cool to see how to apply what your talking about. Like a video of you going through the process in a real example.

Really interesting video. I think i will have to investigate further to see how and if i could possibly use that technique in Unity. Though i am pretty sure that for tiling textures especially, you should use the full two float for the texture coordinates, but i can see how this could work for the kind of game/engine that you are working on. Also i usually try to store the indices in vertex color channels since those are byte instead of float (though you're limited to 0-255 range then). Also i would love to see you make a video about bit shifting, since i can't seem to wrap my mind around that completely. The few times i attempted to do that it would always work only 95% of the time. Anyways, instant sub from me :) looking forward to seeing more from you

I took a shot everytime I heard the word texture, and am now a furry. Thank you.

Thanks. Thanks a lot!

No time wasted! You're just building up your ability to learn the next thing faster!

And now you have 1000 sub, nice talk by the way

That's very interesting, thank you very much! I just discovered this video. May I ask you how you've learned all of that and how you find the motivation to go that deep? Is it your full time job? Trying to sort my life out so I ask other people how they organize themself 😅

This is great! I've never heard of sparse texture arrays! I mostly write graphics code through Qt's RHI framework that ports graphics code between Metal, OpenGL, D3D, and Vulkan. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to support this, probably for portability reasons. I'll just have to stick with texture arrays for now.

I don't know much about graphics, so I'm a little confused about vertices. I've always heard the term "polygons" used instead of "vertices" in cases like that. Are they interchangeable terms, or are they entirely different?

Nice to see youtube pushing smaller creators. You have a very coherent style and presentation already, and as someone interested in bare openGL development this is really useful. However, "irregardless" is not quite what you want to say. It's "regardless".

This is very valuable info, thank you 🫰 How did you start learning computer graphics? I’m currently studying computer science and very interested in learning all about computer graphics, started reading a book called Computer Graphics for Java Programmers (as the only language we learned so far is Java), are there any other resources you’d recommend?

I don't remember using any binding in my game, I just load the texture, pass it through the shader to be mapped on the block sides, and just reload the different textures on the same var, load, draw, dispose.

good job

First, thanks, so much great information! I recently watched another video similar using “mega textures” on the Nintendo N64! Second, what program did you use for all these awesome animations?

Awesome! Please more educational content :)

underrated

fantastic

you had an r place printed out? that's neat

Are bindless textures backwards compatible? Do they work on older GPUs?

AAA Developers: you bought all that vram don't you want to use all that vram?

This is a fantastic video as to an indie developer, but I am using UE5 so I can only find how to use texture arrays, but that's about it for now

Why is padding required for anisotropic filtering?

What's that program at 9:04? I can't read the text

Love ur cat images

So is this feature already implemented by major game engines already? Like UE, Unity, Godot?

1:00 what is that font at the top?

huh, useful :o

having put countless hours into understanding concepts and programming, i consider myself pretty good at problem solving. but everytime i see these videos i feel lost in this endless ocean of unaquired knowledge.

Where is that background at the end?? looks like quebec

Cool video! My only suggestion is that you don't stare straight into my soul the whole time :O

Don't even know how I reach here.

Acerola looks different

🥰

I wish I could load in a girlfriend texture =(

Is there a fucking green screen behind your chair?!?!?!

Furry

Thats why Unity sucks with big game projects. It still in its core, tries to allocate the textures through batch binding, and simple draw instructions. Instead of using whole unshackled power of GPU, it tries to stay within limits, that are non existent anymore. Im just baffled, right now im in the middle of REALLY big project on Unity, and I am optimizing typical "environmental assets". What everyone tells you in Unity community, is to forget about material property overrides, and stick to the standard CPU batching, to fit fps criteria, but in my case standard static batching is completely useless, and is actually worse than GPU instancing. But I hit the wall rather quickly, since GPU seems to just overburden with draw instructions, and it was a mystery for me why does it happen, since RTX 2070 has so much power, that it could pretty much single handedly just solo the whole game computations we have, and still have space for another one. NOW it makes sense. We are just unable to efficiently use the GPU, because its not being used properly whatsoever, and thats hardly our fault. My optimization method is to scale the game down from multiple (about dozens) texture sources, to couple of them, atlased, and dropped into static texture arrays. Couple of materials, with instanced properties on every possible mesh renderer, and strict policy with shaders, and their derivatives. From my working theory, this method should scale dramatically with scenes that have hundreds of different assets, and materials, and I know why now. Thanks