this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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It's not that nobody wants those super high def graphics, it's that most people have no use for them. Most people won't be able to play a game like Starfield at maxed out graphics, so why should they have to download and store an extra 30gb of textures?
while i fully agree it should be an extra download that not everyone should be required to download. i see lots of sentiment here that people feel they shouldn't even make them cause most cant use it. but why should those that can make use of the textures not have them, also helps the game stay more relevant graphically for longer as more people have systems that can make use of the textures
It would be ridiculous to hamstring new games just because some people can't run them at max graphics. It definitely makes more sense to make the high-requirement features optional, not to cut them out entirely. People who buy high-end hardware shouldn't be held back by those who can't afford it, but those who can't afford it shouldn't be held back for the benefit of those who can either.
Isn't this usually just LOD stuff where the high-quality stuff is when you're up close and the low quality stuff is for when you're far away? So you're just about always seeing the high-quality stuff, and it's the stuff that's actually processed in real time like shadows and stuff, that take up practically no space, that are getting toggled when you turn down settings. That's how I understand it anyway.
What LOD does is it uses multiples of the same textures in different sizes so that it doesn't display the larger ones if it doesn't need to. That takes up space due to duplicates, but 4K resolution textures take up 4 times the space that 2K resolution textures do. I'm sure compression reduces some of that, but in terms of size, they are 4 times larger. So if your system can't handle 4K textures, then why use them at all? There's a lot of stuff that you'll never look at close enough that a 4K texture will ever serve a purpose. For a 1080p screen, you'd have to be close enough to the object that you're only seeing a fraction of the texture at once, and they can use other tricks to make close-up textures look better without using bigger ones.
If you have a top-of-the-line PC, it makes sense to install those huge textures, but if you're running an old GPU with 2GB of memory, what use do you have for them? You may as well not install them at all.