Texture Resolutions in games.

[regulus]

When will we see realistic textures that will makes buildings, walls and trees seems a bit more realistic? Game devs seems to have solved human faces, hair, grass, smoke, wind, clouds, fire and rain (on some level), but textures still spoil it in my opinion. Modern Warfare 2 gets a bit closer from what I've seen but it just aren't good enough yet. Does anyone know what's holding them back? Memory?

Was going to ask on Beyond3D but things get a bit technical there.

 

[Hamoodii]

Memory is definitely a factor when it comes to texture res, and a lot of games these days aren't PC exclusives so I suppouse that is definitely a factor.

 

[Ozzie Dave]

Mostly its held back because of the consoles. When the 'next gen' arrives in a few years time games will take another jump again. As a PC gamer we have to suffer the lowest common denominator (consoles) since most AAA title games are ported from them these days, sadly....all these Sli setups are going to waste, nothing to really push them, save the odd PC specific game or an even rarer good port.

 

[Darg]

Carmack is working on a way to stream very high resolution textures from the harddrive/DVD when you need them and get rid of them when you're done with them. So far the results are looking very good. It makes the best use out of what VRAM you have to allow very high resolution textures.

A standard game generally loads all the textures needed for a map when you load it which severely limits the amount and size of the textures you can have. Carmacks goal is to load just the textures that you can see and only at the sizes needed to make them look good.

So no more loading a 1Mb texture for an object off in the distance that will never take up more then a few dozen pixels on your screen.

 

[regulus]

Ah yea, read about it somewhere. Think it was an interview with the design team on 'Brink' from Bethesda. They're using the same technology from Carmack.

 

[TheMeekon]

So no more loading a 1Mb texture for an object off in the distance that will never take up more then a few dozen pixels on your screen.

Never usually the case, games are implemented with LOD (level of detail) models/textures for each prop large piece of environment. So the prop you see in the distance is usually using 10% of its poly budget and 10% of the full texture res of what it would be when standing next to it.

Loading a 1Mb texture for something in the distance that takes up 4 pixels would not get you past alpha stage.

This what happens when items appear to 'pop' into place when you get closer to props/environments. Its basically the model transforming to the higher res version.

Hopefully procedural textures will be possible in the future which will get us past this stage of people just wrapping photos round models. Stuff you see in CGI.

 

[smit101]

When will we see realistic textures that will makes buildings, walls and trees seems a bit more realistic? Game devs seems to have solved human faces, hair, grass, smoke, wind, clouds, fire and rain (on some level), but textures still spoil it in my opinion. Modern Warfare 2 gets a bit closer from what I've seen but it just aren't good enough yet. Does anyone know what's holding them back? Memory?

Was going to ask on Beyond3D but things get a bit technical there.

There are some good mods that add realistic textures,the 'Stalker complete mod' looks great,bricks and concrete look very realistic. Also Qarls texture pack for Oblivion adds some really nice looking stone and concrete textures,you'll need a hefty amount of ram on your vid card though to get both running nicely,512+ preferably.

 

[Calneon]

Definately possible as many games have mods that add high res textures. Fallout 3, Oblivion, Half Life 2, Company Of Heroes (only on units), probably many others.

 

[barmyllama]

Blame console memory restrictions for low resoltuion textures.

Played Operation FlashPoint 2 today for the first time and the low res textures and severe lack of any detail on anything in the distance really make this game look worse than Oblivion did 3 years ago.

 

[regulus]

Definately possible as many games have mods that add high res textures. Fallout 3, Oblivion, Half Life 2, Company Of Heroes (only on units), probably many others.

Added the hi-res packs to Oblivion and Half Life and it still looks crappy upon close inspection.

 

[KNiVES]

Mirror's Edge just contradicts what anyone says about 'consolification'. The textures in that game makes for amazing screenshots.

 

[Axil]

Added the hi-res packs to Oblivion and Half Life and it still looks crappy upon close inspection.

Well if you were using QTP3 with Oblivion I'm not too surprised that the trees look bad and that isn't where Qarl focused. Best texture for those is Mikal's Improved Flora and Trees. Same goes for doors as QTP3 doesn't actually alter them much.

Unfortunately in most games there's a trade off - Sacred 2 is a perfect example of this with the Elite texture pack . With this installed the game terrian looks great but the trade off is a too low view distance as it has to try and cater for graphics cards that have 512Kb VRam (the common size when the game came out).