Prediction - PS3-PS4 and X360-XOne last big performance spec leap

[fatslob-:O]

Pemalite said:

I think the big part of what you are missing with all that is... *drum roll* zoom.
Textures are mapped to a 3D object and is thus not mapped 1:1 with the pixels on screen.

What that means is you could have an 8k texture covering a wall, you could walk up to said wall and stare straight at it.
You would then only be seeing a tiny fraction of that entire wall and not 8k worth of texture detail.

There is a reason why 8k texture packs exist for games like Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout 4 etc'.
And why people see a difference over 2k/4k texture packs, Even when the majority of displays are only 1080P.

Which is why I mentioned before ...  

fatslob-:O said:

It's true however ... 

You wouldn't need anymore texels than pixels in an ideal world but because of the distortions in screen space with respect to how the texels are mapped to the geometry and how there's very few ways we can prefilter in real-time our life just isn't as simple ... (There's really no use for higher texture details once we take into account signal processing theory since the extra information would just be 'filtered' from the output.) 

For 4K you wouldn't need textures any higher than 4096*4096 unless you put your camera to only a quarter of the surface of the assets ... 

But it's as you say, the texels are not mapped to screen space and instead mapped to the geometry itself which causes undersampling and oversampling as described ... 

Storing higher resolution textures is not an elegant solution because of memory and bandwidth consumption. We badly need procedural textures since growth in compute power is far out pacing growth in bandwidth ...