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Packing things into a GPU texture is probably the #1 most common use. If you played a game today then your computer probably spent some time packing rectangles into rectangles.

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Your web browser may have also spent some time packing rectangles into rectangles. I recall reading this article a while back about how Firefox does/did it.

https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2021/02/04/improving-textur...

That’s great; I’d forgotten about it.

Plus there are a fair few programs that render text by rendering the font into a texture atlas once and then using the GPU to copy from the atlas. Your terminal emulator may be doing this, for example.

The truck packing thing is one thing he was proud of. Last time I saw him he was trying to work it out for 3d. But for that particular use case many companies found that optimal packing is not necessarily the best use of time (as some value speed over total shipping volume). Sometimes just stacking it up and leaving some slack was faster. Wonder if the same sort of issues show up in GPU texture packing? I would suppose that could only pop up in some edge cases and only if you are building the textures at runtime.

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