Conclusion

MegaTexture brings a big improvement in overall image quality at the same or even lower performance envelope. But is it a clear replacement for managing discrete, tileable textures? On its technical merits the answer is arguably yes. You get infinite texture variety, don't have to worry about your texture budget and reduce batches/polygons at the same time.

MegaTexture is not perfect however. Firstly, the storage media will prevent using this type of technique in certain games. The Xbox 360 is too important to neglect so games still have to deal with no hard drive and the aging DVD media size. Secondly, this first generation MegaTexture used in ETQW has a couple of artefacts like the zoom problem and being mapped on a 2D grid. Both of these artefacts are solved by the new version of the MegaTexture coming in the id Tech 5 engine.

Still, the terrains in ETQW look very good and although upcoming games like Crysis do sport slightly higher resolution terrain textures, the texture tiling and blending is still visible there, even with copious amounts of vegetation thrown in.

Click for a bigger version	Click for a bigger version
Hand-modelled and hand-painted terrain	The perfect transverse dunes

Overall, while not a silver bullet MegaTexture does have its place and it will be interesting to see if other developers opt for this type of technique in future games.

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The PC version of Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars is available now. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game are expected in 2008. Special thanks to the members of Splash Damage, especially Arnout van Meer, for their help in writing this article.