[atahanacar]

>Hold up, mip mapping is not a way to save RAM in fact it consumes more RAM because not only do you need to have the full-size texture in RAM you also need to keep smaller copies in RAM.

While that's how it's mostly used today, mipmapping refers to storing scaled-down versions of the same texture along with the original texture. You don't have to load all of them to RAM (or VRAM). You can simply store the mipmaps on a hard drive, and only load the required mip levels to the GPU, thus saving VRAM. This way, you are using mipmaps as texture LODs. Think about satellite images of Google Maps.

>What it does save on is memory bandwidth, because you don't need to sample from the full-size texture

Not exactly. It does save memory bandwidth, because you're sampling less texels and reducing cache misses, not because you're sampling from a smaller texture. You're simply not downscaling the texture on the fly, instead using precalculated downscaled pixel values.

[kibibu]

Mip mapping was originally developed neither for bandwidth nor memory reasons, but for texture filtering.