Quality of texture is a huge advantage of procedural textures, not just for the fact that they don't pixelate as you approach them, but your ability to multisample is limited by computation speed, not bandwidth. Which brings up the biggest advantage of procedural textures: Bandwidth For every pixel that is written to the framebuffer, hundreds (if not thousands) of bytes are read from memory in texture sampling. Scaling the clockspeed and adding more processing cores is easy and cheap, increasing bandwidth is expensive.