> Instead of one row after the next, pixels in memory follow a spiral-like curve. This is called a z-order curve[1, 2]. It makes texture mapping and mipmapping

> Instead of one row after the next, pixels in memory follow a spiral-like curve. This is called a z-order curve[1, 2]. It makes texture mapping and mipmapping significantly more cache-friendly than the usual x-y ordering, because these operations are often performed in tiles of 2^n size. I'd say it's more a fractal pattern than spiral-like, to be precise. [1]: https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ComparingXYCurvesAndZOrderCurvesForTextureCoding/ https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ComparingXYCurvesAndZOrde... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve?wprov=sfla1