Sulphur on 21/10/2011 at 20:18
Quote Posted by wonderfield
It's the same story on the PC, really. Pump up the texture pages to 8,192 x 8,192 and you run out of memory on a 1GB graphics card very quickly. Quadruple the size for 16k pages and you need around 1.5GB. It's not that the content within the view frustum requires that many pages to stay resident, but you also need to keep a cache when the player rotates his view around — it's just a ton of data to keep in memory at any given time. The more you try to keep in, the more the engine's going to have to flush out to keep it all within video memory and the more time per X frames spent transcoding.
Indeed, I don't deny that. Of course, bandwidth on PCs isn't infinite either, but it's orders of magnitudes better than what's on today's consoles. Certainly more bandwidth always helps with image quality. Which leads us to...
Quote:
I commented on this elsewhere, but I genuinely don't believe even a four-fold increase in the bit rate on the VTs is going to have a dramatic effect on the image quality. It will result in fairly significant quality increases on darker surfaces, where compression artifacts are more evident, but reducing the compression rate alone won't have dramatic effects elsewhere. As far as having a high-res texture pack is concerned, I honestly don't know if id's uncompressed VT(s) sitting on one of the servers in Mesquite has any higher-resolution data than what shipped. id has the "bitmap" version, so to speak, whereas what shipped was the "JPEG" version (actually a Microsoft HD Photo format). Giving us the a less compressed version, or even the full "bitmap" itself, just isn't going to get us much.
That depends on how their compression algorithm was deployed, really. Going with the bitmap vs. JPEG analogy, whatever algorithm it is, it's lossy compression at the end of the day, so fine detail does get lost. Sure, we're not going to get detail that was never there to begin with, and maybe the four to five-fold increase in detail from a high-res texture pack wouldn't result in a dramatic improvement, but it would help to render subtle detail better.
Quote:
Detail textures are being implemented in the next patch. That's going to help more than less-compressed VTs would.
That would work, I guess, unless it's the age-old trick of running a noise filter across the original textures to approximate higher detail. I don't think id would run a slap-dash operation like that, though, so I'd like to see how it goes.
Note, I still don't have the game, so I haven't been able to actually inspect the art up close, therefore I may be talking out of my ass about some things since my views are bubbling up from the realm of conjecture.
wonderfield on 21/10/2011 at 21:03
Yeah, it'll look a little better, particularly in darker regions. I have a decent un-metered connection and I still don't think I'd download an 80-100GB texture pack for it, though. The only area in which I found the compression offensive was Dead City — every other area looked very decent to me. You have to consider the logistical complexities in distributing that much data to people, too. Valve wouldn't foot the bill to distribute that much data via Steam, and Bethesda probably wouldn't OK the idea of just putting it out via BitTorrent.
In any case, if you're curious how much better the textures would look with less compression, you could grab Microsoft's HD Photo Photoshop plug-in and experiment with outputting originally-uncompressed texture-like images at various bit rates (not forgetting, of course, to then compress the output of that with an S3TC encoder, because that's what Rage does).
