Vector Textures

While I see where this would be useful, it seems as if it would be either very consumptuous of CPU power and memory, or impractical. I dunno, correct me if I''m wrong..

Hmm.. What you''re talking about is interesting, and is in fact a special case of data compression and reconstruction. Current texture maps are created as a set of pixels, which can be compressed as images using DirectX texture compression or similar. This is fine as the hardware to decompress the images is built into most current gen graphics chips. (PS2 has to do things a bit differently)

However, you are suggesting representing textures as a set of vectors, from which arbitrarily sized reconstructions are possible. This is an excellent idea for some textures, especially those with geometric patterns, but would be bad for more "random" textures. Currently there is no hardware dedicated to reconstructing images from vector compression, but I suppose it could be done using shaders (I would have to think about it for a minute though!)

To push the concept further it could be useful to have a number of different compression techniques on hand to suit specific textures. Vector based techniques would deal well with geometric simple images, and fractal techniques would allow similarly scalable "natural" images. Textures composed of harmonics of simple shapes would be well suited to Fourier analysis, or wavelet techniques if unperiodic but similar shapes are needed. Perhaps there is a case for developing a library of shaders to make this possible...

Just had a think, it''d be easy to do as a pixel shader. Don''t know if it''d give much in the way of benefits, it''d depend on AGP bandwidth versus reconstruction time. Memory saving for simple large geometric textures could be worth it though...

It''s basically a texture created on demand. An example might be a sign rendered into a texture using fonts and geometric figures. It''s not really a new concept - it''s just less likely to actually get implemented before all of the other stuff.