My mistake. I could have sworn it was an early version of megatextures. At any rate, it was an advanced openGL engine for the time that pushed graphics cards to their limits. That alone qualifies it as "funky" being in the 5% of games that are openGL and being an advanced openGL engine that pushed the limits of the available technology.

quake wars was the first game to use mega texture. It ran on a modified doom 3 engine.

Whichever game it was I hope AMD gets it together and figures out how to deal with this emerging technology so we don't have another repeat. Fumbling a few lost textures in Doom 3 is one thing, but with Rage its pretty apparent they dropped the ball altogether.

There's early megatexture code in the released Doom 3 source code, but I've run it with some breakpoints set and it never gets hit. Evidence is that roundabout 2000-ish Carmack was evaluating two different technologies for what was then going to be his next engine; one was unique texturing and the other was unified lighting and shadow. The latter was the eventual chosen direction for Doom 3, the former, as we all know, made it to Rage (you can read about the genesis of what became megatexture here: http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/johnc_plan_2000.html#d20000307, although it's real ancestry goes all the way back to software Quake's surface cache). It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that a future rev of idTech 5 will feature both; it will look awesome but AMD driver shenanigans may rear their heads again.

Its highly unlikely that id tech 5 will have both. Id will most likely push other feathers like HDR, Perfect Motion Blur, depth of field, texture detail and texture upscaling. All of which are currently in the engine. Also possible experimental patch for perfect anti aliasing. John Carmack has said some thing along the lines of he does not want to implement technology that he will have to throw out later. While mega texture can have global illumination, id tech 5 is going to be a hybrid engine with id tech 6. Global illumination will not be compatible with sparse voxel octree (Infinite texture detail down to the texcel) in id tech 6. I think its clear id tech 5 i going to get lots of updates with current generation technologies for doom 4, but global illumination not being one of them.

Y'all keep it coming very interesting reading.
Funny thing I was reading this morning that Xbox 360 had trouble running Quake 4 where the PC of the time ran it just fine.
id and others porting to console just "well I don't think" they realize that there is still a huge PC community with some very powerful rigs that still want to play games on them.
I have a PS3, but I can tell you I'd much rather play any game on a computer. But that maybe because I'm old school, I very much dislike the controls of the PS3.
I prefer keyboard and mouse over any other type of controller.
Anyways back to what I was about to say, you would think if Quake 4 struggled on the Xbox 360 back then & played much better on a PC, they would have already know
PC was a much better choose for games. But then again I'm sure its all about the money & them thinking it would make more off of the consoles sale than PC.
Maybe now they will realize there are still many PC gamers and do more work for these advance PC we have now days.

Id tech 6 could be another ten years down the road too making any predictions about AMD drivers for it utterly unreliable.