Next Gen consoles and texture sizes

Rick Stirling

As we gear up for the next round on consoles, we are all looking at polycounts and texturs sizes. Now, I was wondering.....

We like BIG textures - we can pack the detail in. But is it work it?

In the UK, the standard TV resolution is 720x576 (HDTV is very uncommon here). If we start using 2 or 3 textures per character, all at 1024x1024, then each texture is bigger than the entire screen can display at one time. Add in the blurring you get, and is that just wasted space? Even a 512x512 textures for a characters head could be a waste, sinceusually you will see it onscreen at maybe 1/8 of the total screen size, and usually much lower.

Obviously this argument is SLIGHTLY negated by PCs and their sharper displays and usually higher resolutions, but it still holds some water.

What about the use of LOD textures? Not necessarily LOD models, as the overhead of swapping them in and out is not always worth it.

Just chucking some random thoughts out there to the other folk work in this field.

CrazyButcher

what do you mean with LOD textures ? Currently mipmapping would be LOD for textures. As for the sanity about texture res I agree, it doesnt make sense having more res than you will see in average. Level environment textures probably will benefit most of this, as you can res up lightmaps, terrain masks...

Rick Stirling

Ah, with the lod textures, I mean that you resize the texture yourself, and retouch the details.

CrazyButcher

I think dds file format allows this, ie you can manually specifiy all the mip map images yourself. Would allow a bit sharpening by user then, compared to the automatic mipmaps.

Ruz

don;t yuo think the improvements in grpahic quality will come from increased use of shaders rather than increased texture res?
just a thought.

Eric Chadwick

The Nvidia DDS plugin for Photoshop has some great controls for making the MIPs. I like using the Mitchell MIP Map filter, tends to do the best job.

For sharpening I use the Unsharpen Mask filter in the DDS pplugin. First I make the DDS without any sharpening, the close and re-open it, choosing to display the MIPs. I then use Photoshop's Unsharp Mask tool to find out what settings work best, then use those in the DDS tool.

You can learn more about filtering here...
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=378514
(account reqd)

As for sizes, for us it's all about how close we get to the model (what kind of camera behavior we have), and how we juggle our memory. There are still going to be limits and bandwidth problems.