It's like mathematically wrapping a candy-bar wrapper around the chocolate inside. points to a specific pixel on the texture. The texture is mapped to the model, such that each point on the surface of the 3D model (split into triangles), has a co-ordinate on the texture. You have a texture, which is just a 2D image of colors You have a 3D model, that looks like a thing - e.g. In short, the graphics pipeline for getting 'pretty pictures' on a screen is, with some hand-waving to simplify things: A 4K texture, does not require a 4K monitor.
