Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition

Sparse textures

Sparse textures, also known as mega-textures or tiled-textures, provide a way of effectively streaming texture data from disk at runtime. Relatively speaking, if the CPU performs operations in the order of seconds, then the disk would operate in the order of days. So the common advice is that hard-disk access during gameplay should be avoided as much as possible since any such technique risks inflicting more disk access than available, causing our application to grind to a halt.

However, sparse texturing offers some interesting performance-saving techniques if we're smart about starting data transfer for portions of the texture before we need them. Sparse texturing is prepared by combining many textures into an enormous texture ...