this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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Really? Ambient occlusion used to be the first thing I would turn on. Anyways, 4k textures barely add any cost to the GPU. That's because they don't use any compute, just vram, and vram is very cheap ($3.36/GB of GDDR6). The only reason consumer cards are limited in vram is to prevent them from being used for professional and AI applications. If they had a comparable ratio of vram to compute, they would be an insanely better value compared to workstation cards, and manufacturers don't want to draw away sales from that very profitable market.
Honestly, I find 4k in general to be entirely unnecessary. Anything above 1440p is redundant imho, as diminishing returns kick in very fast as the density increases.
For the resolution of the texture to need to be doubled along each axis, you could either have a monitor with twice the resolution, or you could be half the distance away. Most of the time games will let you get closer to objects than their texture resolution looks good for. So 4k textures still give an improvement even on a 1080p monitor.
Texture resolution is chosen on a case by case basis, objects that the player will usually be very close to have higher resolution textures, and ones that are impossible to approach can use lower resolution.
The only costs to including higher resolution textures are artist time and (usually) disk space. Artist time is outsourced to countries with cheap labor (Philippines, Indonesia, etc) and apparently no-one cares about disk space.
It is such a minor improvement, though. Especially, as you've mentioned, on a 1080p screen. And, sorry to say, but having to fill up 150+ Gigs of space for a 20-30 hour game is a complete waste with, as I've said several times, immensely diminished returns.
Let's take UE5, for instance. Texture streaming has become necessary because we can't afford to have a coherent texture map loaded in all at once, precisely because those textures are stupidly large. This causes so, so many performance issues, that I'd argue it's been a downgrade even coming off UE3.
I'd rather have a smooth and OK-looking game which doesn't require me to get a second SSD just to fit it all, than to face significant stutters every time I do a 180° turn because the engine is struggling to load Gigs of uncached textures, which, again, barely look any better.