The majority of disc space on a game like CoD is textures, audio and FMV. There’s no compressing 4k textures to get them to a reasonable footprint without losing quality. Same for 4k FMV.
It’s not management that drives the desire for high-res textures and diverse asset libraries, it’s generally the art team. Once they’re allowed to care about what kinds of shrubbery exist in Borneo and which exist in Minneapolis, you end up with 30 kinds of plants. Multiply that out for rocks, cars, rugs, etc and add in the expectation for 4k or 8k screens and individual assets get huge and the library gets huge.
You’re right that it’s possible to do “pretty good” graphics for less, but it’s telling that your examples are from a decade ago and/or heavily stylized.
Yep, 4k textures, very high quality audio files and FMVs are very big and essentially impossible to meaningfully compress.
If you are saying its the art teams that are to blame… uh, they get their budget, headcount, marching orders… from managment, their team leads… right?
You could always have managment hire other artists with different skillsets… make different decisions about what level of resolution, fidelity, overall number of distinct textures, etc, is actually needed…
A video game is the sum of its parts… and there are teamleads in charge of each of those parts departments, who then hire for those departments, and then you have management and/or some kind of overall creative director(s) in charge of the… entire recipe of exactly what is going to be baked into the proverbial cake.
It is these people’s jobs to come up with an overall vision, and then ensure it is implemented on time, within the budget.
You know, ‘manage’ the game’s development.
Their overall ‘recipes’ including stupid huge texture sizes and what not… thats a choice, not some kind of God given or fundamentally unbreakable scientific, natural law of gaming.
…
As of the latest Steam Hardware Survey, about 7% of PC gamers have a 4K monitor.
Far more console players have a 4K capable TV, but it doesn’t really matter because no currently existing, or announced, upcoming console… none of them can actually, truly render anything with detailed, super realistic graphics at 4k 60 fps… to hit that, they have to use checkerboard rendering + frame upscaling tech… which makes the actual render resolution at 2K or less… often even 4K30fps is often still reliant on checkerboard / frame upscaling.
‘4K’ on a gaming console isn’t actually 4K, all that extra detail usually just gets wasted anyway, blurred out or otherwise lost by the checkerboard rendering or frame upscaling.
Generally speaking, the only games on consoles that can actually run at actual 4K are the not hyper realistic graphics games, they are the ones with simplified or stylized art.
…
Acting as if 4k and 8k textures are some kind of mandatory minimum that must be included in all releases of all games is ludicrous.
As Felix points out… just make these high end textures an optional, free DLC.
The AAA gaming industry has largely done the same thing the car and housing industries have done in the last decade: Everything for sale is now a high end luxury item, there are no more economy class cars, no more new, modest apartments.
This is insane and is fundamentally mismatched with the consumer base, especially right now as the US in particular, and broader world economy looks set for a serious downturn, which will obviously see less spending on emtertainment.
…
Also sure, I’ll give you that No Mans Sky is rather stylized, but they also recently released a massive graphical overhaul update that adds in those super high quality textures… and its still just a bit over 20 gigs of on disk space on my system.
If you think MGS V and SOMA and Alien Isolation have ‘highly stylized graphics’, not graphics which basically aim at being very realistic and true to life… with a bit of stylization thrown into character design / world design / etc … I don’t know what to say, I don’t know how you can say those games are ‘highly stylized’ in the way that like… Windwaker or Valheim or Selaco are.
4k textures do not become magically useless when you have a 1080p monitor. The thing about video games is that the player can generally move their head anywhere they want, including going very close to any texture.
The majority of disc space on a game like CoD is textures, audio and FMV. There’s no compressing 4k textures to get them to a reasonable footprint without losing quality
The majority of disc space on a game like CoD is textures, audio and FMV. There’s no compressing 4k textures to get them to a reasonable footprint without losing quality. Same for 4k FMV. It’s not management that drives the desire for high-res textures and diverse asset libraries, it’s generally the art team. Once they’re allowed to care about what kinds of shrubbery exist in Borneo and which exist in Minneapolis, you end up with 30 kinds of plants. Multiply that out for rocks, cars, rugs, etc and add in the expectation for 4k or 8k screens and individual assets get huge and the library gets huge.
You’re right that it’s possible to do “pretty good” graphics for less, but it’s telling that your examples are from a decade ago and/or heavily stylized.
From a decade ago and just as good as modern graphics. We stopped seeing actual return on graphical fidelity about a decade ago.
Yep, 4k textures, very high quality audio files and FMVs are very big and essentially impossible to meaningfully compress.
If you are saying its the art teams that are to blame… uh, they get their budget, headcount, marching orders… from managment, their team leads… right?
You could always have managment hire other artists with different skillsets… make different decisions about what level of resolution, fidelity, overall number of distinct textures, etc, is actually needed…
A video game is the sum of its parts… and there are teamleads in charge of each of those parts departments, who then hire for those departments, and then you have management and/or some kind of overall creative director(s) in charge of the… entire recipe of exactly what is going to be baked into the proverbial cake.
It is these people’s jobs to come up with an overall vision, and then ensure it is implemented on time, within the budget.
You know, ‘manage’ the game’s development.
Their overall ‘recipes’ including stupid huge texture sizes and what not… thats a choice, not some kind of God given or fundamentally unbreakable scientific, natural law of gaming.
…
As of the latest Steam Hardware Survey, about 7% of PC gamers have a 4K monitor.
Far more console players have a 4K capable TV, but it doesn’t really matter because no currently existing, or announced, upcoming console… none of them can actually, truly render anything with detailed, super realistic graphics at 4k 60 fps… to hit that, they have to use checkerboard rendering + frame upscaling tech… which makes the actual render resolution at 2K or less… often even 4K30fps is often still reliant on checkerboard / frame upscaling.
‘4K’ on a gaming console isn’t actually 4K, all that extra detail usually just gets wasted anyway, blurred out or otherwise lost by the checkerboard rendering or frame upscaling.
Generally speaking, the only games on consoles that can actually run at actual 4K are the not hyper realistic graphics games, they are the ones with simplified or stylized art.
…
Acting as if 4k and 8k textures are some kind of mandatory minimum that must be included in all releases of all games is ludicrous.
As Felix points out… just make these high end textures an optional, free DLC.
The AAA gaming industry has largely done the same thing the car and housing industries have done in the last decade: Everything for sale is now a high end luxury item, there are no more economy class cars, no more new, modest apartments.
This is insane and is fundamentally mismatched with the consumer base, especially right now as the US in particular, and broader world economy looks set for a serious downturn, which will obviously see less spending on emtertainment.
…
Also sure, I’ll give you that No Mans Sky is rather stylized, but they also recently released a massive graphical overhaul update that adds in those super high quality textures… and its still just a bit over 20 gigs of on disk space on my system.
If you think MGS V and SOMA and Alien Isolation have ‘highly stylized graphics’, not graphics which basically aim at being very realistic and true to life… with a bit of stylization thrown into character design / world design / etc … I don’t know what to say, I don’t know how you can say those games are ‘highly stylized’ in the way that like… Windwaker or Valheim or Selaco are.
4k textures do not become magically useless when you have a 1080p monitor. The thing about video games is that the player can generally move their head anywhere they want, including going very close to any texture.
And you can’t make 4k quality optional because…?