When describing the (quite interesting, and well-described) "partially resident textures" technology, which is in turn inspired by John Carmack's MegaTexture technology, the review states:
For AMD’s technology each tile will be 64KB, which for an uncompressed 32bit texture would be enough room for a 4K x 4K chunk.
Isn't this off by a factor of 1,000? 4K x 4K is 16M texels, which at 32 bits per texel would require 64 MB. A chunk of 64 KB cannot hold that. They repeat the "64KB" value for the chunk size many times, not sure in what direction they're wrong, really. I guess if I kept up more with graphics tech, the answer would be obvious. :)
4kx4k pixels is a higher resolution than all but the most extreme gaming system can display (ignoring the fact textures are wrapped around 3d objects). So, I think the idea is 64KB chunks out of an arbitrary image that could in theory be 64 MB. AKA, you get to have 1,000 of those chunks for your 4kx4k image some of which are loaded into memory.
4kx4k textures can easily be displayed even on my Macbook Pro's 9400M card. It does cost a high amount of memory; depending on if and how it's compressed, if it has mipmaps, if it contains an alpha channel etc. it can be anywhere between ~16 and ~64 MBs, but is very doable.
For AMD’s technology each tile will be 64KB, which for an uncompressed 32bit texture would be enough room for a 4K x 4K chunk.
Isn't this off by a factor of 1,000? 4K x 4K is 16M texels, which at 32 bits per texel would require 64 MB. A chunk of 64 KB cannot hold that. They repeat the "64KB" value for the chunk size many times, not sure in what direction they're wrong, really. I guess if I kept up more with graphics tech, the answer would be obvious. :)