Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition

Using mipmaps wisely

There would be no point rendering small, distant objects, such as rocks and trees, with a high-detail texture if there's no way the player would ever be able to see that detail. Of course, they may see some slight improvement, but the performance cost may not be worth the minor detail increase. Mipmaps were invented as a way to solve this problem (as well as to help eliminate aliasing problems that were plaguing video games at around the same time) by pregenerating lower-resolution alternatives of the same texture and keeping them together in the same memory space. At runtime, the GPU picks the appropriate mipmap level based on how large the surface appears within the perspective view (essentially based on the texel-to-pixel ...