jpg for 3d, faster rendering time

I was woundering it it would be posible to use some technology like jpeg to idenitfy a pattern that can be used in place of the orginal texture. This way far off object would still be textured. But they would not requires lots of video memmory, or constant resampling. Leaving more room for other things. Like the textures close to the camera.

Some how I would imagin using pre defined, small textures, would speed up sl rendering time.

Textures are rendered in 3(?) passes. Distant objects do not show the full-resolution texture, but only the first pass.

imagine a grid of 1000 x 1000 object. where the camera start at object row x 1. And x 1000 is the farthest distance away from the camera. imagine if each object has it's own unique texture. Right now sl would sample each texture, and create a low image texture of that texture and store it into memory. I would think takes a notable amount of time / space. 1000000 texture to sample, 2000000 to store. 1000000 to store in video memory.

But if the texture has been pre sampled, and has a single number stored, witch refer to a pre defined texture. A texture that the computer already has. Perhaps one of say 1000 pre defined textures. Small perfectly square textures, of low resolution. If each object had such a number, when applicable.
Let say 50% of the object match one predefined texture. suddenly the sl graphic engine only has to sample 500000 textures instead of 1000000. Plus of those 500000 textures it doesn't have to sample, at max it only has to store 1000 textures in video memory.
That dosen't take into account that those 1000, are being used in many instances. So they are not as offen loaded into, or delete from video memmory. Reducing bus trafic. Reducing load on the card, extra.


but it's just a random idea.

Im not sure what eggy means with 3 passes, but I guess he means MIP maps. So SL already reduces the resoloution of textures far away. But it does'nt reduce memory though. In fact MIP maps increase memory usage 33%. (critical for render speed though)

There are texture compressions avalible and it would be nice if SL had an option to choose to use it or not.(user preferance) As far as I know DXT texture formats are supported from GeForce2 and up.(dono about ATI, but i imagine its the same).