I look forward to the day that game companies start making hi res textures an optional part of the installation. I don’t need all of the textures used for 4k when I’m running in 1440p High. They are just wasted space on the hard drive.
For the user interface they can easily inform the user which options are restricted if they don’t install the textures.
Texture resolution doesn’t map to screen/render resolution like that. Depending on the object, its mesh, the physical size (dimensions) of the in-game object, and how close your player view/camera is to it, you can absolutely see a clear difference between 2k and 4k textures for the object, even when the game is rendering at 720p or lower.
That is correct, it isn’t an exact scaling for every single texture yo the setting which is why I said I don’t need most hi res textures at a lower resolution. Many his res textures are not used at all on lower settings even if some are, and the developers would know wbich are needed and which are not.
Bethesda was notorious back in the day for using uncompressed textures. Not lossless textures, just fully uncompressed bitmaps. One of the first mods after every game release just compressed and dynamically decompressed these to get massive improvements in load times and memory management.
More importantly it was limited by physical media back then.
Like, DVD level physical media, there was a hard limit for everyone, so there was a huge focus on optimization to save space
Now that almost all games are downloaded, they can be as huge as they want. So optimizing for file size is often the first place that gets cut. You might not keep a huge game installed, but it’s rare to avoid buying a game due to file size.
I mean I’m pretty sure the massive game sizes we see today are almost exclusively caused by high res textures and assets.
I look forward to the day that game companies start making hi res textures an optional part of the installation. I don’t need all of the textures used for 4k when I’m running in 1440p High. They are just wasted space on the hard drive.
For the user interface they can easily inform the user which options are restricted if they don’t install the textures.
Texture resolution doesn’t map to screen/render resolution like that. Depending on the object, its mesh, the physical size (dimensions) of the in-game object, and how close your player view/camera is to it, you can absolutely see a clear difference between 2k and 4k textures for the object, even when the game is rendering at 720p or lower.
That is correct, it isn’t an exact scaling for every single texture yo the setting which is why I said I don’t need most hi res textures at a lower resolution. Many his res textures are not used at all on lower settings even if some are, and the developers would know wbich are needed and which are not.
Bethesda was notorious back in the day for using uncompressed textures. Not lossless textures, just fully uncompressed bitmaps. One of the first mods after every game release just compressed and dynamically decompressed these to get massive improvements in load times and memory management.
More importantly it was limited by physical media back then.
Like, DVD level physical media, there was a hard limit for everyone, so there was a huge focus on optimization to save space
Now that almost all games are downloaded, they can be as huge as they want. So optimizing for file size is often the first place that gets cut. You might not keep a huge game installed, but it’s rare to avoid buying a game due to file size.