Texture resolution in modern games.

JuanHoyos

Hi Folks, how're you? Hope fine!

The last couple of days I was wondering which is the texture resolution used in modern games like Ryse Son Of Rome, The Order 1886, Rise Of The Tomb Raider, The Division, Uncharted 4.. and some of the ""older"" ones like Crysis 3.

I thought that for characters (at least the principal) and terrain should be something like 4k, and maybe 2k for almost all of the environment because 2k still looking pretty good if you know how to handle it. Also, I was wondering what engine could handle the best graphics? Unreal Engine, CryEngine, or maybe Frostbite..?

The thing is that I have talked with a friend and he swears Crysis 3 uses 16k textures in almost all the game, hahaha in my opinion that is just not possible!! Never in life! But if for some reason it is true, I want to someone explains me how PCs can handle that amount of ridiculus texture resolution? Nowadays PCs, because maybe in the future it will be possible. I hope that someone with experience in the game industry could answer my questions

Thanks a lot guys,

Juan Hoyos 

musashidan

Your friend is highly misinformed. Large textures take up huge resources. 16k hogs memory even when loaded to an offline renderer, never mind real-time! Renderers like Vray have tricks to combat the amount of memory consumed by many large texture maps. And substances are coded to leave a much reduced footprint.

So for now, 2k is used most generally (I'm talking PC here) with 4k maps also being used in certain pipelines. 16k might be realistic years from now, but certainly not now.

Have a look at this thread that's right below yourshttp://polycount.com/discussion/166164/uv-texture-size#latest 

poopipe

Where I'm at we work to a specific number of pixels per metre and use tiling detail maps to add extra snazziness where required.
This keeps everything consistent and means you're only using as much memory as you actually need for a given asset. 

Like tri-count, texture resolution is entirely dependent on circumstance.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in a studio where they're trying to manipulate 16k textures with the new photoshop, I'd learn all sorts of new swearwords

CharacterCarl

As poopipe brought up: pixel density is the most generally used approach in determining texture resolution.
For instance, whereas a third-person type of game might do with a 512x512 texture for 2x2 meters a first-person-shooter might need either 1k or 2k textures to cover the same amount of space. The height and distance of the assets from the camera also impacts the resolution, so that models which are positioned further from/higher than the player/camera also need less resolution.
The assumption of your friend might stem from the fact that good-looking games do a very good job of hiding texture repetition/resolution by blending multiple textures, using displaced geometry or layering of differently tiled textures and decals to create variation.