This is one of the reasons why textures in the GPU's are swizzled - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swizzling_(computer_graphics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiz

This is one of the reasons why textures in the GPU's are swizzled - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swizzling_(computer_graphics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swizzling_(computer_graphics) From the old demo days, there was the famous rotozoom effect, and it showed how linearly arranged array when rotated 90 degrees was becoming way slower, and if some swizzling was done it was better. Another example is texture mipmaps. If you have one large image, say 4096x4096 without mipmaps, and you have to scale it down and display at say 64x64 - then there would be a lot of cache misses (and aliasing problems - shimmering, etc.) And those are just the most obvious problems, there are lot of more tricky ones. Judy Arrays were written with that in mind, but maybe they are overly comlex for the things achieved - http://judy.sourceforge.net/ http://judy.sourceforge.net/