Texture vs resolution

[Goffender]

I would like to find a guide to texture quality vs resolution of display. I have upgraded video card and have no trouble running any texture mods but they dont seem to be as good as many of the pictures. Im sure that my 1080p monitor is a limiting factor, im just not sure how limiting it is. And maybe some upgraded textures look worse than vanilla on low res display?

[QuagaarWarrior]

If your monitor is 1080p surely the pictures you are looking at are in 1080p?

[jones177]

Your monitor is a viewport into a 3D world. 1080p means your viewport is 1080 pixels tall.

 

1k textures are 1024 pixels wide X 1024 pixels tall. Unless you have the texture right up against the screen you are seeing the game engines representation of the texture.

 

2k textures are 2048 pixels wide X 2048 pixels tall. Textures that large can only viewed at 100% on a 4k monitor. A 4k screen is 2160 pixels tall. All you see on a 1080p monitor is a scaled version of it.

 

Not all textures are square. Some are rectangles but their height dictates what we call them and they will use ether 512, 1024, 2048 & 4096 pixels.

 

The main idea of large textures in games is that as you move closer to an object more detail is revealed, like in real life. Poor design is when detail is lost as you move closer. Textures that are too large for your viewport are a resource waste.

 

Textures for this game are in DDS format. You can download a viewer here. https://www.nvidia.com/object/windows_texture_viewer.html

Viewing them at 100% will give you an idea if they are too large or too small for your monitor.

 

You can also get a good idea of the quality of a textures by using a viewer. I always download textures first and view them before installing.

 

Later

[Goffender]

Thanks Jones, very informative and i will definitely check out the viewer.

[COMBATFUN]

Even on a Full HD monitor you can see that 4k texures look slightly better than 2k textures. But most of the time you can only see the difference, if you move very close to the texture and don't move. So most likely you won't recognize any improvement between 2k and 4k textures on a Full HD Display during gaming due to distance and movement. Well it also depends alot on how large the mesh is. A small apple in 4k or 2k...you see no difference. But on a huge dragon, you can see it.

 

A lot of people still install 4k textures, because their VRAM is simply large enough (8+ GB) and therefore they don't get any performance loss.

Edited November 8, 2018 by COMBATFUN