Introduction Mipmaps are usually introduced as smaller copies of a texture. That is correct, but it does not explain why a no-mipmap screenshot looks sharp while motion shimmers, why foliage disappears, why normal-mapped highlights flash, or why an atlas bleeds only in lower levels. A more useful model treats a mip chain as three things: A tool for temporal image stability . A mechanism for allocating bandwidth and resident memory . A hierarchy whose levels can preserve differe...