Was thinking again a while ago what waste PBR textures can be under most lighting.
Kind of weird to do a 4x texture memory increase - assuming BC1-5 and no alpha/metalness, e.g. BC1 base color + BC5 normal map & BC4 roughness - that will only show up under specific lighting conditions and elsewhere appears flat.
Though doubling texture resolution in both dimensions is also a 4x increase that might never show up (esp. with upscaling) so all things considered, maybe 4x isn't that bad.
@archo Yeah but at sensible resolutions, the higher-rez textures will never be loaded. So all they're wasting is disk space and their own production time. Whereas PBR is burning my precious DRAM for minor LSB differences. Boooooo.
(I say this with honest love to all my PBR shader writers)
(it's a joke. This is a bit)
(or is it)
@TomF Texture loading time from disk and download time/bandwidth would be wasted as well, which seems relevant with modern 150 GB games. (Also not a lot of such games fit on 1 TB consoles.)
But I suspect for high res textures there could be a way to stream the biggest mips on-demand from the CDN to the GPU based on what the GPU needs which AFAIK nobody's doing yet. PBR seems uniquely disadvantaged in this regard (but at least the number of parameters doesn't seem to be growing infinitely).
Arvīds Kokins
Tom Forsyth
Josh Simmons
James Milne