Texture resolutions on PC games.

[qp Azure qp]

Hi.

Whilst PC games have been run at "higher than 'High definition'" for about ten years on PC, someone pointed out to me that it was merely the monitor and graphics engine running at that resolution. Not the in game models/textures.

I was led to believe that with the advent of PS3 and 360 running at 720/1080 that gfx would come leaps and bounds because the textures themselves were being specifically detailed/rendered for a high definition display, instead of just upscaling or whatever it is changing the resolution higher was called back in the day.

So:

Are textures in todays PC games designed to be run at high or higher than "high" definition? Eg 1900x1000 1600x1200 2560x1600 etc? Or are we just packing the pixels closer, making it look smoother, instead of having clear detailing on them.

Thanks for any information.

Azure

[Whiternoise]

I don't know exactly, but if it's any help, the textures/models used for ES4:Oblivion were the same for the 360 and the PC, so i assume it's largely based on the power of the graphics card. I assume that a single texture is used at all resolutions, but that the pixels are spaced further out at lower res's. So.. i would have thought that textures are made to look very good (or the best that the designer can make them) at high definitions, but also so that they can be scaled to lower resolutions - it then depends on the user's computer whether it can display the extreme high-def textures.

Oh, and welcome to the Hexus forums

[Spud1]

intersting question, and the answer is i'm not sure..

but as far as I know, no game has texture resolutions that high at teh moment. iirc oblivion ships as standard with 512x512 landscape textues and 256x256 character model textures with 1024 or 2048 textures, but they are a mod and not standard - and obviously won't work with something as underpowered as the 360 (in comparison to a high spec pc with, say 2x512meg cards in sli/crossfire)

[Ferral]

Interesting I must say.

Run a game at 640x480 res and it looks big and clunky and full of jaggy straight edges. As you will know, 640x480 is the amount of pixels created to make up the image. Up that to 1024x768 and you are getting more smaller pixels creating the same image giving it that sharper look due to a higher amount of pixels creating the image.

Also in the higher resolutions I have found that you don't need to have the FSAA set as high because there are more pixels creating the image so jaggy lines are not as predominant on games like FPS.

Reason consoles can pull off what they do and look pretty damned good is that a normal 4:3 aspect TV is made up of 320x240 pixels to create the image. However if you ran a game on a PC at 320x240 it would look terrible. So inevitably the console games are made for this resolution and therefore can be made to look a lot better due to the fact that lower resolutions don't require as much power from the processor and GPU. This gives the developers a wider scope when it comes to effects and visuals.

[qp Azure qp]

Nice one white noise. So we can say that modern games probably have texturing built for display on at least 1080 resolutions.

[Whiternoise]

Thanks, as i said.. i don't really know, so i wouldn't take my word for it, but thats my hypothesis

[kreeeee]

<snip>

Wrong... by a huge margin:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:S..._video_res.svg

[Ferral]

Yeah, just realised what I have done.

The old 8 bit computers ran in that res ! Don't know why that came to mind !

[Whiternoise]

Must be your love of consoles eh?

EDIT: this was my poor attempt at an insult towards consoles, implying that they had extremely low resolutions.. although this doesn't decrease performance, so i don't really know why i posted it, i think i was too tired

[directhex]

old pc games ran in 320x200 too, so it ain't just consoles...