Discovering RVTs

RVTs represent a way to manage huge textures and with the newest Engine’s version, they became much faster and more optimized.

The primary use of RVTs is to reduce the texture’s overdraw. As we will see in Chapter 9, we can paint textures on our terrain (Landscape) with multiple layers. The Engine keeps calculating all these layers to show you the correct results. All this information is stored in the GPU and processed in real time. When the number of textured layers on a single pixel on the screen is too much to be calculated in real time by our GPU, we have performance issues.

An RVT takes all this layer information and baked them on a single texture that is stored on the GPU, but it has been already calculated. It is something very similar to the concepts of Static Lights that we saw in Chapter 6, but RVTs work in real time.

This solution allows us to create huge and very complex terrain with a high number of high-resolution textures without...