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.
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.
There are games that do that, often called something like “high resolution texture pack”. People usually recommend against downloading them, because any potential increase in quality is usually met with severe performance or load time issues.
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.
That’s what they want you to think. In reality they just stopped trying to be efficient with storage because of Internet delivery vs DVD size limits. They probably didn’t even try middle-out compression!
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.
Which sucks for anyone that doesn’t have a 8GB+ GPU. I’m fine with 1024x1024 textures, I don’t need or want higher res textures, I want good framerates
I mean I’m pretty sure the massive game sizes we see today are almost exclusively caused by high res textures and assets.
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.
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.
I mean we had that
We did?
Whole bunch of games you could select texture quality on install back in the days when games came on CDs.
I must have missed them!
On some games, like Fallout 4, the “HD” textures are free DLC. I don’t know why we can’t just do that for most games.
Yeah, I also remember some games allowing you to choose compressed or uncompressed textures when they first started to be supported by new cards
Many already do, Kingdom Come: Deliverance is one that immediately comes to mind.
There are games that do that, often called something like “high resolution texture pack”. People usually recommend against downloading them, because any potential increase in quality is usually met with severe performance or load time issues.
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.
That’s what they want you to think. In reality they just stopped trying to be efficient with storage because of Internet delivery vs DVD size limits. They probably didn’t even try middle-out compression!
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.
Which sucks for anyone that doesn’t have a 8GB+ GPU. I’m fine with 1024x1024 textures, I don’t need or want higher res textures, I want good framerates
You can usually set that in game although the settings are usually vague (low, med, high, ultra, etc.)
I don’t need nor want to download the damn files in the first place. Most games won’t allow me to delete them either