I am working on an application that loads really big images to display as textures mapped either in the background or mapped to a 3d triangulated surface.
However, because of the size of the images, I have generated up to 30 textures or more at the maximum texture size to render the whole thing. As a result, it’s easy to run out of memory because OpenGL is storing all the color data (3 bytes per pixel).
Is there some way to store the texture data in a compressed format inside of OpenGL? I really need to try and use up less memory if possible for storing the textures in OpenGL. Our machines often have to resort to virtual memory because it is so much data.