To answer your question, the terrain shows the details of the texture just fine with the build-in antialiasing (pixel blurring, can be turned off). In the example below I used a 8192 x 8192 texture map in the form of a .tga file loaded through an action script assigned to the unchunked 129x129 terrain. The texture file was loaded at startup. A nexus of 240 mb was assigned to the engine. (The texture file was a whopping 192 mb alone).

testimage1 shows a closeup of the texture pattern as shown in PaintShop Pro:



testimage2 shows the resulting terrain with the texture applied and antialiasing turned on:



The loading time for the terrain with this texture was over 4 min and the computer was obviously croaking under the burdon. Background music that usually starts up right away stopped a number of times until the level had loaded. After that everything worked just fine including music, player mobility and physics.

The main difficulty using this size terrain texture may be with making the texture in the first place. Graphics programs that can handle these textures well are few. PaintShop had noticable difficulties with this texture and the image files could not be saved as .dds or .hdr, at least not with the nvidia plugin used. I would not dare to think about what would happen if you try to use and work with original BlueMarble World images of 21600 x 21600. Still, with the right hardware it should be possible.

cheers,