In the game and simulation industry, texture resolution is a problem. If you run the math on how big textures need to be to match pixel resolution 1:1 in 3D space, it quickly becomes infeasable for large scenes.

One solution is to stream the mip levels, and to create virtualized mipmaps. This basically lets you create a 128k by 128k texture, which works fine because only small blocks are loaded. It’s literally the same thing as virtual memory, but for texture memory.

One downside is that when you shut down the game / simulation, all of that data no longer exists. It was virtual. It either streamed from the sever or you packed it to disk somewhere. Either way you have to set it up again the next time the program starts.

I don’t know whether the present topic would let you bypass this limitation, but if there was some way to start a program with a huge amount of memory allocations preloaded, that would be very attractive. And if you can reboot without losing that, then suddenly you can start crafting persistent worlds that load instantly with ~infinite resolution.

This is the dream that voxel tech was supposed to make into reality, and it will only become more of a concern over time as mixed reality tech matures.