What is even the point of 4k textures?

[Burning Bridges]

What is even the point of 4k textures?

masturbation, ego stroking, sales of pointless new graphics cards, bloating of video games sizes and development.
as you can see, plenty of reasons. all wrong, but still plenty.

Obviously a lot of 4K textures are shit. Some developers do HD textures just by scaling up the originals, which is of course nothing but piss taking, just like the "300m water resistance" rating on some Chinese 50$ shitter.

Some scenery-makers like OrbX releases orthophoto scenery that is ZL16 resolution but with the footprint of ZL17. You download the low res version as zip and then the disk space grows exponentially. People still buy them because they look better than the originals in terms of colors, even if they just waste a lot of your disk space.

But like I wrote texture size is related to distance and screen resolution, so any increase in quality can become necessary to improve visuals when you get closer. It just depends how close you are.

Take for example an airplane, there is a big difference whether you are content to look at it from some meters away and it essentially looking like a model, or if you want to walk to it and inside and look at the textures from centimeters, and it eventually looking like a real airplane.

 

[Pathfinder: Kingmaker]

Well, i have an hunch that as time goes by, games are going to take the Control route instead

Yeah, that's a thing. It's impossible to just translate visuals from a raytracing engine to a simple raster one since they calculate light completely differently, so every light source and material should be tweaked in order to make it looks similar. Hopefully they can partially overcome this problem by developing a "twin" pair of raster and raytracing engines, preconfigured to looks as similar as possible and use the same tools. Sort of like Blender does it with Cycles and Eevee, one being a simplified raster engine that renders much faster but tries to emulate the RT one as much as possible, making its quick result usable as a preview for a final raytraced image

 

[gurugeorge]

One area where ultra high resolution does make an actual difference to gameplay is with in-game monitors/graphics. If you can get closer to an in-game readout, for example, and it still looks realistic (and not blurry/pixelated) as you get closer to it so that you can actually read it, that's ultra high resolution doing an important gameplay job.

But other than that, it's just like, if you're peeping over a wall from cover or something like that, it's nice to have the same sort of detail in the wall itself. It's also good for cutscenes - it's really ugly when a character in a cutscene using the in-game engine passes by an object that's closer and blurred and pixelated.

But in general, with any profession, there's always an argument for pursuit of headroom for its own sake. It's just obvious, if you can, you should, because you never know when you might need it.

 

[Verylittlefishes]

You look at a game like Metrox Exodus and you'll be hard pressed to see how RTX is worth it when the picture still looks "complete" even without it.

I've heard they disabled the rtx-off mode in remaster completely.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

*checks screenshots in first post*

The only difference I note is the ground in the first comparison screenshot, it's clear to see there. Not so with the rest.

 

[Drakortha]

The point is to take up more hard drive space, resulting in your need to purchase new hard drives with ever increasing storage capacity. It is a conspiracy being orchestrated by the computer hardware corporations.

 

[Anthedon]

Because GPUs with 12GB of VRAM don't sell themselves. You might be able to tell the difference between HD and 4K textures if you analyse a screenshot, when you actually play a game it's much harder.

 

[Drakortha]

16 times the detail

 

[Tavar]

JarlFrank, do you have a 4k monitor?

No and I don't see the point of having one

Then you have obviously never tested one. UHD is majestic incline just for the smooth font alone which affects every piece of writing on your screen (including desktop usage, of course). It is also nice for games, but that is just a bonus. Regarding your screenshots: I don't see a difference in them. I need to check out an UHD version of them to gauge the quality. Can you post / link them, please?

 

[Drakortha]

The more pixels a game has the better it is!

 

[Drakortha]

More pixels is more immersion.

 

[Absinthe]

JarlFrank, I agree that a lot of high-res textures are pointless masturbation but HD texture mods are usually not the right spot for high-res texture comparisons, since they're just upscaled versions of lower res textures, and even the ones that use AIs instead of batch filters to produce HD textures (which is annoyingly common) pretty much work backwards off of "looking like whatever the hell the lower res texture looked like."

 

[tritosine2k]

First off game sizes not doubled because textures.
They have multiple ,DUPLICATE files in there for easier access. It's just that besides DLSS , OLED and other new mouth-watering (https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/what-is-even-the-point-of-4k-textures.138335/#post-7286456 lol) stuff ,you don't hear about this because it'd be more obvious how far behind the curve most of this stuff is and cue-you-in about the broken nature of 2021's backwards technology .

 

[Butter]

Even if 4k textures weren't a placebo, most gamers have absolutely no sense of aesthetics. They think DoF, bloom, and AI-upscaled faces look good. There's absolutely no reason to try and enhance the graphical quality of games, because the people buying the games don't know the difference.

 

[JarlFrank]

I need to check out an UHD version of them to gauge the quality. Can you post / link them, please?

I can't because I just got them off google image search without following the links through to their origin

 

[Burning Bridges]

To show why an opinion like "what's the point of 4K?" is just retarded.

The ideal resolution of textures depends on how much detail you want to show. But 4K doesn't even say how much detail there is going to be on your screen because you need to know the size of the 3d object that the texture is mapped to. So "4K" is just a 4096x4096 image mapped to something that can be good or bad depending on wether it's the Titanic or an apple.

This are different views of the 4K version of a Zibo 737. If you look at the airplane from far away it looks good. But you cannot move closer and still feel like you are a passenger entering the plane. Therefore in the coming years people will realize that in computer sims you are basically just looking at models. Not very realistic. And therefore they will vastly increase texture sizes once enough VRAM is available in common graphics cards.

If you think not only of this but of satellite imagery the coming years will see resolutions way beyond 4K.

The screenshots that Jarl Frank showed are a joke anyway because they would look shit in any resolution. Especially the background of the gun which looks like they blended two lowres perlin noise generated bitmaps with photoshop, cranked up all color/contrast sliders to the max and call it "limestone texture".

I mean seriously wtf is this shit. Who would enable 4K on such an abomination and expect it to look any better

 

[Roguey]

Since the Steam survey reveals that only a small percentage of players have a 4k monitor (2.41%), they absolutely should be something you opt into downloading rather than something that everyone has to put up with even though it's useless for 98% of us. Things shouldn't be dummy-proofed for the 2%.

 

[Derringer]

Most 4k monitors are fake since the color depth is capped past 2k resolutions, they're all overclocked 2k screens.

 

[Dexter]

two HD texture mods for Fallout 4
HD texture mod for Borderlands 2
Far Cry Primal HD texture mod

First, what you're comparing here is not "4K" and "Standard HD Textures", but "HD Texture Mods". Made by random people from the Internets. For all anyone knows there might not actually be a difference between the two other than that a random person took the Standard Textures, added some sharpening or manually "upscaled" them and maybe did other light modifications and uploaded them as "HD Texture Mod".

The problem here is that in most cases only the developers themselves have the higher resolution textures in storage, and most often they'll not release them for public consumption or might use them only down the line for some "Remaster" effort or whatever. In this case Modders can either take the available textures and try to edit/process them to try and "make them look better" while remaining faithful or they take their own pictures of something similar and replace the ones in the game, in which case it might look a lot better but it won't be faithful to the Original e.g.: https://www.moddb.com/mods/serious-hd-retexture-landscape-skyrim-by-z4g4/

Second, all of your pictures are not 4K, they're 720p and horribly .jpg compressed. How the fuck do you want to tell the difference between "HD" and "4K" textures from compressed 720p Screenshots? This points to severe user retardation, like watching 4K movies on a shitty 1366x768 TN Laptop screen and exclaiming that you "DON'T SEE ANY DIFFERENCE AND WHAT THE BIG DEAL IS ABOUT!?!"

Cause I don't see a difference, and I don't see the point. I actually hate overblown texture sizes as they just increase the install size of a game. Your game would usually be 20 gigs in size, but you added 4k textures and now it's 100 gigs? Fuck right off with that shit. A barely perceptible increase in texture quality is NOT worth 80 gigs of space!

Nobody fucking cares if you see the difference. They're not for you and your shitty 720p TN panel. If you ask me, they can release games that are 300-500GB if they make sure the quality is right. HDD space nowadays is hardly expensive (we are getting into affordable 18-20TB HDD and 4TB SSD territory - or at least were before Minerfags tried ruining that too) and you can download and delete shit really fast. I don't want to see any blockiness, banding, artifacting and blurry shit in either videos/cutscenes or on game textures and other assets if it ain't necessary because some retard is whining about "MUH SIZE". I'd be fine downloading additional "Texture Packs" though and having some sort of "Pleb Version" for people like you (like what console versions usually are for).

For instance I would have been fine downloading uncompressed or lossless compressed Megatextures for RAGE at even 1-1.5TB given it looked the best it could have: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/john-carmack-on-jre.129437/page-2#post-6295717 but because of space concerns on the 360 and console mouth-breathers the game was limited to 3 DVDs and ended up looking the way it did (which it will for eternity or till someone at least gets the idea to Remaster it) with blurry close-up textures even on PC despite sporting revolutionary Tech.

Instead they've even regressed since then e.g. comparison of what's supposed to be the same spot between RAGE (2011) and RAGE 2 (2019):

 

[Burning Bridges]

Since the Steam survey reveals that only a small percentage of players have a 4k monitor (2.41%), they absolutely should be something you opt into downloading rather than something that everyone has to put up with even though it's useless for 98% of us. Things shouldn't be dummy-proofed for the 2%.

4K textures have nothing to do with 4K monitors at all.

 

[Burning Bridges]

The problem here is that in most cases only the developers themselves have the higher resolution textures in storage, and most often they'll not release them for public consumption or might use them only down the line for some "Remaster" effort or whatever. In this case Modders can either take the available textures and try to edit/process them to try and "make them look better" or they take their own pictures of something similar and replace the ones in the game, in which case it might look a lot better but it won't be faithful to the Original e.g.: https://www.moddb.com/mods/serious-hd-retexture-landscape-skyrim-by-z4g4/

Everything using compression these days is another big culprit here. A trained eye sees right away that the images have horrible JPG artifacts and are practically useless. But people who only get images only from google don't realize what is amiss,

The problem is that it is actually hard to find any uncompressed images in the web at all and people who do not use them at work actually have never seen them.

If someone wants to see actual higres images it's best to go to NASA right away or laserscanning companies who promote architectural orthophotos.

Just as an example https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01F3TCP3JSX0YVPCQ8TK0QHP59.tif

 

[Dexter]

I mean seriously wtf is this shit. Who would enable 4K on such an abomination and expect it to look any better

That actually doesn't seem to be a Screenshot, but a heavily .jpg compressed 720p Thumbnail of a YouTube video that runs at 4K comparing the "differences" with a "High Res Texture Pack" (wouldn't be surprised if most of them are, since they're all named "maxresdefault.jpg"). You can kind of see what they're going for in a few cases, but yeah it's obviously mostly processed/sharpened shit and not actually "High Resolution Textures" or a Retexturing effort which makes it a bit pointless aside from removing a few jaggies in some of the worst cases:


Actually here are rest of the Sources:

 

[Burning Bridges]

Borderland 2 uses cell shading, quite an odd choice to demonstrate something about textures.

 

[Derringer]

A lot of games have piss-ugly blurry textures with or without 4k bullshit, some japanese titles force depth of field vaseline to cover it up, sometimes you're just stuck using a sharpening shader like CAS to make them not look like shit.
https://github.com/BlueSkyDefender/AstrayFX/blob/master/Shaders/Smart_Sharp.fx

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

While I don't care for them bloating up games myself, there are reasons for it even if you're not on a 4K monitor. Old games, I think Deus Ex at least had two textures for walls, one where you're far away and one where you're close to it. 4k just makes the whole process smoother. Might not be a worthwhile trade-off for you, certainly isn't for me. I haven't really seen any game that makes me go "wow, I want to spend thousands of dollars on a new graphics card and monitor". Personally, I wish people would focus on improving hair and clothing, so they're not just part of a character's model, but modeled separately. That kind of thing deserves to be something more than a tech demo.