To expand on azornathogron's answer, when you are working with 2d data (it generalises to 3d too!) you often want to filter pixels in a rectangular area. This i

To expand on azornathogron's answer, when you are working with 2d data (it generalises to 3d too!) you often want to filter pixels in a rectangular area. This is commonly for bilinear filtering or some kind of convolution kernel. If you don't interleave the bits and have large textures (think 4096 pixels wide) where each pixel is 4bytes big, that means there is a distance of 16kb between a pixel and the pixel below it. This is super bad for caches (really important for the TLB in the MMU which is usually way smaller than data caches). In GPU literature you'll see this called "tiling" (again like azornathogron said it's not always pure morton order), Intel document their tiling layout, here's an older layout doc: https://docs.mesa3d.org/isl/tiling.html https://docs.mesa3d.org/isl/tiling.html