GoKawiilGame engine developer details Haar wavelet compression for 3D texture storage
A developer building a 3D polygonal game engine describes using Haar wavelet basis functions to compress low-contrast textures and their mipmaps. The piece explains that a typical 256x256 texture consumes 256KB of RAM, and that a scene with dozens of visible textures plus many more stored off-screen can require roughly 200MB of memory, a burden for typical end-user computers at the time.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The approach suggests wavelets could let game engines shrink texture memory footprints without sacrificing the multiresolution mipmap system used for antialiasing at a distance. This kind of optimization work reflects the era's hardware memory constraints, where developers had to find mathematical shortcuts to fit rich visuals into limited RAM.
- Haar wavelets are used for multiresolution compression of texture data.
- A single 256x256 texture with mipmaps can require hundreds of kilobytes to over 200MB across a scene.
- Memory constraints on typical end-user computers drove the need for such compression techniques.
Source: comonad.com, 2026-09-28
Published there as: “Wavelets in 3D Graphics”
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