Studio CohortMay 26, 2023
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
Show threadAmini Allight
@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!)
May 26, 2023 at 1:22pmWeb
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