Feedback Wanted: Streaming Virtual Texturing (in preview for 2020.1+9-preview)

Streaming Virtual Texturing is in preview for Unity 2020.1 from beta 14 and up. You can download the sample project here. The sample uses the HDRP 9-preview.33 package that you can find in the package manager when enabling preview packages in the project settings.

Streaming Virtual Texturing is a texture streaming feature that reduces GPU memory usage and Texture loading times when you have many high resolution Textures in your scene. It works by splitting Textures into tiles, and progressively uploading these tiles to GPU memory when they are needed.

You'll need Shader Graph to add Streaming VT to a shader. The online user guide here goes into the details of how to set up your project for VT and how to author your content.



The sample project shows a basic scene with roughly 1GB of compressed 16K, 8K and 4K streaming textures. Streaming is enabled by adding the textures to a Sample VT Stack Node in ShaderGraph. Memory is optimized by setting the textures to "Virtual Texturing Only" in the importer. The system allocates 384MB of GPU caches to stream in the texture tiles.

Try out our sample project and let us know what you think!
We have been discussing Streaming VT in HDRP on this page.
We look forward to reading your feedback there!

Aljosha