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.
Oof you really don’t know how any of this works, do you?
Unless we are talking about some kind of… gridded out master texture map that has a whole bunch of textures common to say a particular level, a particular biome or environment’s commonly used asset set, and then the game addresses sections of this one large image as the particular textures of particular objects… and that master file is 4K or larger, and just always kept in memory for say a particular level…
Then uh, no, if you have a 1080p monitor, and your entire screen is filled up in game by say a 4k texture of a wall, or a poster or something…
All you are doing is pushing 4x the pixels through the game and your system to ultimately still render at a maximum of the 1080p your monitor can show you… for every single texture in the game.
This is why it often doesn’t even make sense to run a more modern game at very high or ultra texture settings on a 1080p display… you just literally cannot see the difference, and all it does is slow down the game and your system.
…
You’d get better image quality and performance from having a 1080p texture, Anisotropic Filtering, and perhaps some degree of some kind of Anti Aliasing.
There are a small number of games that allow you to render the entire game at say, 105, 110, 125% your actual display resolution, and use that in lieu of Anti Aliasing… and in those scenarios, having your textures at 125% of 1080p can improve image quality by reducing jaggies in a much more brute force way.
But this is not usually done very often, because while yes, this can provide superior image quality to using many kinds of Anti Aliasing, it is usually massively less performant and will degrade your FPS significantly.
…
There are a myriad of possible scenarios where it could make sense for a certain class of textures in a particular game and engine might be significantly larger than the textures for common objects amd buildings and such… but that would be an extremely in depth, technical, specific and particular, case by case discussion.
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.
Oof you really don’t know how any of this works, do you?
Unless we are talking about some kind of… gridded out master texture map that has a whole bunch of textures common to say a particular level, a particular biome or environment’s commonly used asset set, and then the game addresses sections of this one large image as the particular textures of particular objects… and that master file is 4K or larger, and just always kept in memory for say a particular level…
Then uh, no, if you have a 1080p monitor, and your entire screen is filled up in game by say a 4k texture of a wall, or a poster or something…
All you are doing is pushing 4x the pixels through the game and your system to ultimately still render at a maximum of the 1080p your monitor can show you… for every single texture in the game.
This is why it often doesn’t even make sense to run a more modern game at very high or ultra texture settings on a 1080p display… you just literally cannot see the difference, and all it does is slow down the game and your system.
…
You’d get better image quality and performance from having a 1080p texture, Anisotropic Filtering, and perhaps some degree of some kind of Anti Aliasing.
There are a small number of games that allow you to render the entire game at say, 105, 110, 125% your actual display resolution, and use that in lieu of Anti Aliasing… and in those scenarios, having your textures at 125% of 1080p can improve image quality by reducing jaggies in a much more brute force way.
But this is not usually done very often, because while yes, this can provide superior image quality to using many kinds of Anti Aliasing, it is usually massively less performant and will degrade your FPS significantly.
…
There are a myriad of possible scenarios where it could make sense for a certain class of textures in a particular game and engine might be significantly larger than the textures for common objects amd buildings and such… but that would be an extremely in depth, technical, specific and particular, case by case discussion.