FAST Racing NEO powered by 2nd generation engine for Wii U supports and uses 4k-8k textures

[Ninjahound101]

fatslob-:O said:

curl-6 said:

fatslob-:O said:
The real question here is the game going to show all 4K-8K textures at once ? I presume that they won't because the WII U is severely lacking memory bandwidth, memory size, as well as TMUs to even attempt showing every detail of the texture. The engine that they have is probably modified to support john carmacks megatexture technology to dynamically stream textures at a different resolution.

Shin'en have said on twitter that memory size was not a problem, as they could compress a 4k texture down to 10MB.

As for memory bandwidth they previously said that:

"Theoretical RAM bandwidth in a system doesn’t tell you too much because GPU caching will hide a lot of this latency."

Just how many 4-8K textures are they going to use then ? Once you get alot of objects on screen the complexity increases. 

As for shin'en's over statement about memory bandwidth, there's only so much you can do with 32MB. See the reason as to why bandwidth was important in the first place was to feed the GPU otherwise functional units will start to get under utilized. TMUs, shaders, ROPS, and everything else in the GPU is exetremely dependent on it. The reason as to why the X1 wasn't able to achieve 1080p for some of multiplatform titles or exclusives has to do with the main memory bandwidth being a bottleneck. (Aside from the lowered amount of ROPS ofcourse.) How else does the GPU get fed with alot of other data ? You can not keep constantly relying on the eDRAM to feed the GPU much like how the X1 relies on the eSRAM! It has to eventually access the main memory and only the main memory because it likely has the most data being resident on it. The purpose of caching is to SAVE BANDWIDTH by storing frequently accessed data. It was not meant to COMPLETELY FEED THE GPU. 

Now don't get me wrong! I'm not saying that the WII U isn't capable of handling 4-8K textures but it shouldn't be able to handle it at a regular basis given that it likely has a lack of TMUs and everything else I stated before. Do not fret about this issue. There are other ways of about solving this issue like I had said before. The megatexture technology introduced by john carmack in RAGE will resolve alot of issues regarding the WII Us lack of bandwidth and TMUs by trying to only stream the required highest resolution textures for a certain assests of a scene so that it can conserve alot of texture fillrates ad bandwidth so that the level of detail gets scaled back when objects are far away while also being scaled up too where the objects near the camera will have the highest level of detail. 

The car/spaceship models will probably always be 4-8K(maybe 8K at small numbers and 4 at larger numbers) and other significant stuff will be in those resolutions while the rest will be 1080p as far as i can tell