Studio Cohort
Why are games not separated out by resolution when downloading? With lots of modern games having large download sizes, I'm curious why no one does this. I could be wrong but I'm assuming when you download the game, you get all the textures in every resolution from ~720p to 4k. But, if I don't have a 4k monitor, why can't I opt out of downloading the 4k textures? I'm not nearly far enough into my gamedev career to know the answer to this so I'm curious if anyone here will know.
#gamedev #games
May 26, 2023 at 1:02pmWeb
Show threadAntiquity/Midnight Spire GamesMay 26, 2023
@StudioCohort I was just talking about this the other day. Unless my memory fails me, some games used to have high-resolution texture packs available as separate downloads. I don't know why they can't do the same thing now. Laziness? I shouldn't have to download and install 100 gigs of textures that I will never use.
Show threadStudio CohortMay 26, 2023
@midnightspire It's kind of funny that history might end up repeating itself that regard. Games used to have to do that sort of thing because of memory and storage amounts being so low. Now they might have to start doing it again because the data they're storing is so big.
Show threadSimen StorsveenMay 26, 2023
@midnightspire @StudioCohort Some still do, like the recent FarCry 6. They have a pretty gigantic pack of hires textures you can download if you want to
Show threadAmini AllightMay 26, 2023
@StudioCohort A texture that is 4k (as in 4096×4096) might still have a significant effect at 720p (e.g. imagine you display it at 40 × 40 m in the game world as a floor texture, the pixels will be quite visible).
Developers could go through and manually or automatically downgrade everything by a certain amount but they don't, I assume to save time and reduce complexity in deployment (which is already quite hard!)
Show threadStudio CohortMay 26, 2023
@AminiAllight I hadn't considered that. I just assumed that all the textures when I run a game at 1080p would also be 1080p. But, now that I think about it more, I can be at 1080p and still choose to use the high resolution textures. So, I guess it's less about the monitor resolution and more about the VRAM amount. In which case games should do it based on the VRAM capacity of your Video card
Show threadAndreas GroisMay 26, 2023

@StudioCohort I guess that's mostly a question of tooling and available developer time.

Technically I think it shouldn't be too hard to do, given that #UnrealEngine is already partially there, with its Texture Streaming support.

Another reason I could think of is that publishers might be worried that having an extra download for larger textures could confuse users, leading to a worse perception of of the game, but I don't really know anything about publishing, so that's just speculation.

Show threadStudio CohortMay 26, 2023
@soulsource yeah that makes sense with the added confusion. I could definitely see it making it easier to think the game looks worse. Maybe an opt out strategy would work better?
Show threadRaptor May 26, 2023
@StudioCohort texture size has little to do with screen size, if you used 720p textures at 720p resolution everything will like likely be blurry as you get close to it, even a game on 1080p can benefit from 8k textures. As for why they don't ship them seperately, for one common texture formats store all the resolutions for different mipmap levels in one file, you don't use one resolution, you generally use at least a half dozen of each texture.
Show threadStudio CohortMay 26, 2023
@raptor85 Ah I see, that makes sense, I didn't know that. Especially about it all being in one file. However, if I can amend my original question to instead be about VRAM, I think it would still make sense to attempt. Again, not that familiar with all the texture resolutions being in one file, but somehow tying that in with how texture quality in the quality settings usually works maybe? But that could not make any sense. Again, not that familiar with it
Show threadRaptor May 26, 2023
@StudioCohort some games do that, that's what stuff like "HD Texture packs" are that a lot of games have as DLC (often free) on steam, they basically just have lower resolutions of all the mip levels in the standard download and higher resolutions of all of them in the HD dlc. That's less for space though but that the hd textures will literally lag less powerful PCs, since it basically doubles texture res at all quality settings.
Show threadStudio CohortMay 26, 2023
@raptor85 I know I've heard of that, but I haven't seen that on modern AAA games. Especially not the ones that people are complaining about the size for, which is where I think it would be most useful.
Show threadRaptor May 26, 2023
@StudioCohort oh a lot of that space in modern AAA is due to laziness though, they just don't bother with much compression or any sort of care in generating/storing mipmaps, it's easier for them to just dump everything at the consumer pc and hope it can hold it all. Quite a few games could easily do a quick compression pass that can still be real-time decompressed/streamed and save up to 60% of disk space, but to do that they'd have to care first.
Show threadRaptor May 26, 2023
@StudioCohort and this is really nothing new either, just the sizes are now larger since the basic assets are a lot larger to begin with, a lot of older games that took up 15+GB easily compressed under half that size. AAA has always been lazy, especially on pc ports.