How do Games Load SO MANY Textures? | Sparse Bindless Texture Arrays

How do modern video games manage to load hundreds of high resolution textures when OpenGL expects them to limit themselves to 16 or 32 per draw call? In this video, we go over Sparse Bindless Texture Arrays, a collection of advanced graphics programming techniques in OpenGL and Vulkan, which can be used to get the most out of the video memory available. We also cover texture compression and vertex memory layout, two other techniques which can be used to reduce the memory footprint of games.

I'm a University Student in Computer Science, and I'm endeavoring to be an indie developer. I'm creating Zepha, my own voxel engine, which I'm using to create my own game, as well as an extensible, stable modding framework for community creations. I learned about the techniques in this video first-hand from the 4+ years I've spent developing it.

If you're interested in the type of stuff I show in this video, then be sure to subscribe to be notified when I upload more videos like this! I would really appreciate any sort of interaction, as my channel is super small right now and I'm hoping to grow it in anticipation of my game's release :) Otherwise, thanks for watching!!!

My other social medias:

Discord: https://aurail.us/discord
Twitch:   / aurailus  
Patreon:   / aurailus  
Tumblr: https://tumblr.com/zephagame
Livestream VODs: ‪@AurailusVODs‬

Video Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction
02:14 - Sparse Textures
04:10 - Texture Arrays
06:25 - Bindless Textures
07:19 - Texture Compression
08:58 - Vertex Optimization
10:39 - Final Notes
11:07 - Closing Remarks

Music Used:

5PM - Animal Crossing
Tabloid Jargon - Sonic Mania
Pandora Palace - Deltarune
Lights, Camera, Action! - Sonic Mania
CORE - Undertale
7AM - Animal Crossing

Useful resources:

https://learnopengl.com
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020791...
https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/A...
https://registry.khronos.org/OpenGL/e...
https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/B...
https://registry.khronos.org/OpenGL/e...

#opengl #gamedev #coding