Why pretend? A texture is just an array of floats. The thing preventing you, the programmer, from seeing it as something beyond an "image" is really yourself. I

Why pretend? A texture is just an array of floats. The thing preventing you, the programmer, from seeing it as something beyond an "image" is really yourself. In modern graphics, we use textures to represent all kinds of data. Projections onto different spherical harmonic modes, luminance histograms, atmospheric data, etc. A texture is just data and a shader mutates that in a highly parallel way with specific coherence semantics. Before knocking it, I suggest educating yourself a bit more.