Class for handling Sparse Textures.
Sparse textures are textures where not the whole texture data can be present in memory at once. They are also commonly called "tiled textures" or "mega textures".
Imagine a 16384x16384 texture at 32 bits per pixel - it would take 1GB of memory. The texture is broken down into rectangular "tiles", and each tile can either be present in memory or not. You can load & unload these tiles as needed based on distance from the camera, sectors of the world that the player has to see, etc.
Otherwise, the sparse textures behave just like any other texture in shaders - they can have mipmaps, can use all texture filtering modes, etc. If you happen to read from a tile that's not present, you can get undefined result (on many GPUs the result is a black color, but that's not guaranteed).
Not all hardware and platforms support sparse textures, so you should check SystemInfo.supportsSparseTextures before using them. For example, on DirectX systems they require DX11.2 (Windows 8.1) and a fairly recent GPU; and on OpenGL they require ARB_sparse_texture extension support. Sparse textures only support non-compressed texture formats.
After creating the sparse texture, query the tile size with tileWidth & tileHeight. Tile sizes are platform and GPU dependent.
Use UpdateTile or UpdateTileRaw to make a tile resident in memory and update its color data. Use UnloadTile to unload a tile.
See Also: Sparse Textures.
| isCreated | Is the sparse texture actually created? (Read Only) |
| tileHeight | Get sparse texture tile height (Read Only). |
| tileWidth | Get sparse texture tile width (Read Only). |
| SparseTexture | Create a sparse texture. |
| UnloadTile | Unload sparse texture tile. |
| UpdateTile | Update sparse texture tile with color values. |
| UpdateTileRaw | Update sparse texture tile with raw pixel values. |
| allowThreadedTextureCreation | Allow texture creation to occur on any thread (rather than the dedicated render thread). |
| currentTextureMemory | The amount of memory currently being used by the non-streaming and mipmap streaming textures combined. |
| desiredTextureMemory | This amount of texture memory would be used before the texture streaming budget is applied. |
| GenerateAllMips | Can be used with texture constructors that take a mip count to indicate that all mips should be generated. The value of this field is -1. |
| nonStreamingTextureCount | Number of non-streaming textures. |
| nonStreamingTextureMemory | Total amount of memory being used by non-streaming textures. |
| streamingMipmapUploadCount | How many times has a texture been uploaded due to texture mipmap streaming. |
| streamingRendererCount | Number of renderers registered with the texture streaming system. |
| streamingTextureCount | Number of streaming textures. |
| streamingTextureDiscardUnusedMips | Force the streaming texture system to discard all unused mipmaps immediately, rather than caching them until the texture memory budget is exceeded. |
| streamingTextureForceLoadAll | Force streaming textures to load all mipmap levels. |
| streamingTextureLoadingCount | Number of streaming textures with mipmaps currently loading. |
| streamingTexturePendingLoadCount | Number of streaming textures with outstanding mipmaps to be loaded. |
| targetTextureMemory | The amount of memory used by textures after the mipmap streaming and budget are applied and loading is complete. |
| totalTextureMemory | The total amount of memory that would be used by all textures at mipmap level 0. |
| hideFlags | Should the object be hidden, saved with the Scene or modifiable by the user? |
| name | The name of the object. |
| anisoLevel | Anisotropic filtering level of the texture. |
| dimension | Dimensionality (type) of the texture (Read Only). |
| filterMode | Filtering mode of the texture. |
| graphicsFormat | Returns the GraphicsFormat format or color format of a texture object. |
| height | Height of the texture in pixels. (Read Only) |
| imageContentsHash | The hash value of the Texture. |
| isReadable | Returns true if the Read/Write Enabled checkbox was checked when the texture was imported; otherwise returns false. For a dynamic Texture created from script, always returns true. For additional information, see TextureImporter.isReadable. |
| mipMapBias | The mipmap bias of the texture. |
| mipmapCount | How many mipmap levels are in this texture (Read Only). |
| updateCount | This counter is incremented when the texture is updated. |
| width | Width of the texture in pixels. (Read Only) |
| wrapMode | Texture coordinate wrapping mode. |
| wrapModeU | Texture U coordinate wrapping mode. |
| wrapModeV | Texture V coordinate wrapping mode. |
| wrapModeW | Texture W coordinate wrapping mode for Texture3D. |
| GetInstanceID | Returns the instance id of the object. |
| ToString | Returns the name of the object. |
| GetNativeTexturePtr | Retrieve a native (underlying graphics API) pointer to the texture resource. |
| IncrementUpdateCount | Increment the update counter. |
| Destroy | Removes a GameObject, component or asset. |
| DestroyImmediate | Destroys the object obj immediately. You are strongly recommended to use Destroy instead. |
| DontDestroyOnLoad | Do not destroy the target Object when loading a new Scene. |
| FindObjectOfType | Returns the first active loaded object of Type type. |
| FindObjectsOfType | Gets a list of all loaded objects of Type type. |
| Instantiate | Clones the object original and returns the clone. |
| SetGlobalAnisotropicFilteringLimits | Sets Anisotropic limits. |
| SetStreamingTextureMaterialDebugProperties | Uploads additional debug information to materials using textures set to stream mipmaps. |
| bool | Does the object exist? |
| operator != | Compares if two objects refer to a different object. |
| operator == | Compares two object references to see if they refer to the same object. |