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 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 
@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.
May 26, 2023 at 1:57pmWeb
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.