The full title of this paper is improved “Alpha-Tested Magnification for Vector Textures and Special Effects”. It’s about a technique to use vector textures when decaling for improved precision when magnificating. This kind of decal is useful for signs and such things that contains text or symbols because they can easily be represented as vector graphics. The left image below shows standard Alpha-Testing and the image on the right shows the improved version.

Link to the paper:
http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/SIGGRAPH2007_AlphaTestedMagnification.pdf

Most games that contains big cites doesn’t fill the buildings with proper interiors because of the cost in time and performace to do so. Instead they only apply a texture on the buildings exterior and make interiors only for a very few buildings that are of special interest for the player. With this method you can fake the interior of buildings without the need of much extra work from the artist, programmer or designer. The result can give very living cities.

Link to the paper describing the interior mapping in detail:
http://interiormapping.oogst3d.net/

A method to create realistic water by combining normal mapping and vertex displacement. The water looks best when viewed from a distance.

Link to the chapter in GPU Gems that describes this method:
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter18.html

An approach to pack arbitrary sized textures in one big texture. This is useful for example when saving lightmaps as they will be small and in a large quantity so you don’t want to resize them all to power of twos’ and save them separetly.

 An image of the result of a packing of a big amount of lightmaps, the padding in white is just for making the different maps more visible.

Link to the source:
http://www.blackpawn.com/texts/lightmaps/default.html