Phil Spencer - Virtual Reality Not Yet 'A Thing'

[Dr.Henry_Killinger]

CladInShadows said:

Dr.Henry_Killinger said:

VR is a niche audience, I said nothing about PC. Those having a PC powerful enough to support 4k OR is a niche of that VR audience, and I'm not talking about a game running on OR, a game developed specifically for OR.

Also unless you are upscaling to 4k, then it will cost more, if 4k textures could just materialize when you ran the game at higher resolution settings many artists would be out of a job.

Sorry, misunderstood what you meant by "niche market".

However, onto the 4K thing.  Textures have nothing to do with whether to render a game in 4K or 1080p, or 1440p, or whatever resolution you want.  That's all it is.  Resolution. A texture's dimensions just indicates how detailed an object's surface will look when up close to it.  And that varies from game to game, regardless of resolution, depending on the developer's intentions and their balance between graphics and performance.

You make textures when you develop(create it) a game not when you render(run it) it, furthermore, textures determine the color applied to each pixel or a texel(a unit of texture), it doesn't affect cpu, but the texture itself is stored in vram so that it is drawn by the gpu on the pass. Texture is not resolution, all resolution determines is how many pixels are stored in the framebuffer.

The texture itself is just a 2d image applied to a 3D object.

So yeah you can render a game developed in 480i in 4k, but it will still have 480i textures applied to it. The framebuffer will hold 4096 x 2160 pixels. 

The textures applied to the models will still look blocky even if rendered with more pixels.