Textures

Textures store the image data we need to display on the screen. They represent a 2D array of pixels in memory that can be used for many different purposes, as you will see in this book.

Note

The pixels inside a texture are referred to as texels. We use this distinction because through filtering, scaling, and other transformations, we may lose the 1:1 mapping between a texel in the image and a pixel in the output frame buffer.

Textures also take up much of the memory available to a game, making it important that you apply techniques to reduce their size as much as possible when working on memory limited devices such as tablets or phones. Textures are generally stored on the GPU in special memory designed for quick access; however, on some platforms that memory is shared with the system memory, reducing the amount of space you have even further.

Note

GPU refers to Graphics Processing Unit. This is a piece of acceleration hardware that is designed to handle the mathematics required to...