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Intrinsic on 03 February 2015
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its a common misconception that 4k/8k=much bigger games. However that's just not the case.

In games, 3 things take up space. Textures, videos and audio. Those are the most space hungry assets of any game. The audio side of this isn't really an issue, you can only have so much audio in a game, so that will never take up more than 3-5Gb (and that's really pushing it). The video part is a major culprit. Even if using videos made from the in game engine and stored as a video file (trick used to allow background level loading) or using full on CG videos, you are basically still storing a video file on there. 1hr worth of full HD video is over 15GB big.

But as game tech and hardware improves, in game IQ is at a level where CG videos aren't necessary anymore. So they won't have to store chunky video files in their games. So that too is not really an issue.

Which brings us to textures. Textures are measured in texels. 500x500kb, 1000x1000kb, 2000x2000kb, 4000x4000kb...etc. The higher the number, the higher the texture resolution used. The higher the texture rez, the more system memory and bandwidth you need to store and move them around respectively.

1080p/4k/8k all have fixed memory allotments. Basically they have absolutely nothing to do with what is actually on the disc. If you take super Mario bros from the 80s, as is, then output it at 4k, it will draw the exact same amount of frame memory (in relation to resolution) that crysis 3 will require. And that draw is all on the system RAM side of things. Not on storage space. Take the textures from that game however, and upscale them to 8000x8000kb texels, and it will cripple a PS4 and will require over 30GB of storage space.

The funny thing is, realistically speaking, games don't even need anything more than a 2kx2k texel rez, anything higher than that is simply overkill. OK, maybe 4kx4k is justifiable, but anything more is just unnecessary and a waste of resources. Reason being that when u get that much higher, it becomes impossible to see the difference in added texture rez.

Hope that clears it up.