Resolution Question

[RS13]

OK, so 1080p=1k and 2160p=4K. Makes sense, double the height and width and you'll quadruple the pixels on screen.

 

Now here's where I get confused. I sometimes see people talking about 2K retextures or 4K retextures for games they're playing in 1080p. How's that work. If my monitor--or in my case, TV--is set to 1080p is there any affect from retexturing things in higher than 1K? Are these two uses of "1k," "2K" and "4K" not-at-all related?

 

Thanks to whoever can clear this up for me.

Edited May 8, 2015 by RS13

[FMod]

No, this was very wrong.

 

4K or 5K is the resolution movies are filmed at, when modern digital cams are used, and 4K is the resolution good theaters show them at. This is 4096x2160 and up.

2K or 2048x858 up to 2048x1556 is the resolution movie theaters use.

 

"UltraHD" or 3840x2160 is almost correctly called 4K, since it's close enough. The use of 2K to refer to other displays is incorrect unless they are actual professional movie displays at 2048x1080.

 

Textures are almost universally square, so 1K is 1024x1024, 2K is 2048x2048, 4K is 4096x4096.

 

4K textures require a high quality 50+ megapixel camera on a very steady tripod to capture in full detail. A high quality 30+ megapixel camera is sufficient for grass and other green-rich images though. Virtually no textures are created from images anywhere near this quality, so 2K is universally sufficient.

[Doryani]

OK, so 1080p=1k and 2160p=4K. Makes sense, double the height and width and you'll quadruple the pixels on screen.

 

Now here's where I get confused. I sometimes see people talking about 2K retextures or 4K retextures for games they're playing in 1080p. How's that work. If my monitor--or in my case, TV--is set to 1080p is there any affect from retexturing things in higher than 1K? Are these two uses of "1k," "2K" and "4K" not-at-all related?

 

Thanks to whoever can clear this up for me.

 

You don't need high resolution monitors to use high resolution textures. But high resolution monitors require some high resolution textures.

 

When installing a texture you first need to think about the object. In 1080P or even in 4K, installing 4K butterfly texture would make no sense as you will mostly don't see any difference from 1K version of it. You would need to get very very very close and screenshot it asap to see actual difference. Basically, it's a very small object for texture size to make difference. Sure I would install 1K texture for it because vanilla textures are meh. But that's it. Anything above that would just eat your VRAM for no actual reason.

 

But let's talk about something much bigger, let's say a Tree or a Dragon or even a Fort, in that case you might need to search for high resolution versions of it, because it's a very common object you usually run into and also it's a very big object. The odds of you getting face to face with a Dragon or running through a forest is quite high, and when you get close to a dragon, even in 1080P, 8K would make a tremendous amount of difference compared to 1-2-4K. Well maybe not against 4K, but it will still look somewhat better.

 

Basically, big things require big textures to look good, regardless of your monitor resolution.