Software & Game Developer Alex Goldring recently revisited his implementations of Virtual Textures in WebGL from a few years ago, sharing breakdowns and live demos. The example above shows the map of Greece from Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, a massive 32,768 x 32,768 pixel image.
If loaded as a normal texture, it would require 4 GB of GPU memory, and the PNG file itself is 804 MB, which would take a long time to download for most users. With Virtual Texturing, however, the map loads almost instantly. The image is split into small, fixed-size tiles and uses 2048 x 2048, which is just 16 MB of VRAM. You can try the demo and read more about it here.
More of Alex's VT demos can be found below:
