I’m tired of seeing games with bad blurry textures, even games with good textures can look bad cause they don’t go with the art direction. Raster works alright for ‘realism’ based games, but there’s a whole slew of games that don’t mimic reality in the least.
Is there anything coming down the pipeline to give an alternative? Vector textures, upscaling, vertex coloring? I’m an artist and not so much a techie so I’d care to hear some thoughts on this…
Well you can blame consoles and mobile for low-res and blurry textures. Limited ram means limited texture resolutions and the xbox 360 only has like 512 mb ram or something like that. Everyone wants to make their game run on as many systems as possible so they target the lowest common system specs.
As far as alternatives, not anything that I know of. I doubt there will be too many advancements, at least until games start actually using hardware to its fullest. Ptex could potentially be the next big thing as it would do away with UV mapping, but right now at least, it’s not too great for games.
Textures. They’re still the best you’ve got and will continue to be for another decade at least. They’ll just get higher res.
I’d like to see procedural textures in games!
Texture maps are still used even in film quality CG. It’s not the texture’s fault so much as it is how you use them. But even in fields where there are none of the limitations games have, textures are still used. There doesn’t seem to be any amazing alternative to this. Vertex colors can be used for very high poly things like zbrush, but good luck getting that into a game engine and even then the quality isn’t really better then a decent texture map.
There are research papers in the academic journals and conferences about alternatives to traditional texture mapping.
For example, procedural example-based textures: Microsoft Research – Emerging Technology, Computer, and Software Research
A more recent idea that I find interesting is diffusion curve textures: Microsoft Research – Emerging Technology, Computer, and Software Research
These are a new kind of vector image representation that gives you more control over the shading gradients compared to previous methods.
It also seems to work well on the GPU.
I haven’t heard of any such techniques used in games, but I wouldn’t really know.
You could just use flat colors and then real time shadows on everything >…> lets face it, its not the textures fault - leverage better texture tech, ptex for example. Its not natively in unity, but I’m sure its not impossible for someone to program something like that as a plugin 
I guess the main alternative is a procedural texture, like with Allegrorithmic stuff. If the texture is calculated on the gpu in the fragment shader it can have unlimited resolution and antialiasing.
E-On Software has some pretty amazing procedural stuff:
I’ve heard Unreal Engine 4 is focused on procedural assets just like these, but have no real info about it.
Procedural is subject to a lot of the same limitations textures are still though, and come with their own performance issues. Also, it depends on your own situation. If you’ve got artists available, generally art will usually look better than procedural.
But can’t be rendered as such, only “zoomed in”. When it is rendered, it is rendered on a texture with finite resolution and subject to the mercy of your uvs Unless it also calculates uvs as well, but then that’s pretty much limited to simple shapes.