Pemalite said:
Those texture issues that are described in that PDF have always occured to various extents and have thus generally always required filtering and work arounds.
But it doesn't change the fact that higher resolution textures do have an an advantage even when they greatly exceed the screen resolution due to distance and size of surfaces.
You should install a 4k texture pack to Skyrim and compare that to Skyrim with a HD texture pack... With the screen resolution set to 720P.
The 4k textures will win every single time. Every damn time.
Besides, not all surfaces are the same size either.
Megatexturing used in say... Rage would have benefitted from 8k textures even at low display resolutions... Because that texture is spread over a significant area of the game world.
As for Memory and Bandwidth, well. This is why technologies like Delta Colour Compression, Texture Compression, Normal Map Compression, lightmap and shadowmap compression, Culling and so on... Exist and continue to be improved upon.
Plus GPU's are coming with 8GB of video memory in the mid-range these days, not many games are pushing that.
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Higher resolution textures do have an advantage but there would be less need for them if we had a good LOD system or texture stitching system in place ...
DCC only helps wih framebuffer compression. You can compress normal maps with texture compression. Lightmaps are a bad idea going into the future of global illumination and shadow map compression is not a realistic idea ...
Pemalite said:
Megatexturing or Partially Resident Textures is the interim goal.
The Megatexturing in Rage could have had a massive single texture that is like 32,000 x 32,000 resolution, but then the engine could cut that texture up and only load it in chunks that are visible to the player.
And using compression... Meant it was extremely memory and bandwidth friendly as the chunks could be streamed off the drive directly into memory on a per-needs basis, but it was CPU intensive, I think starting with the Radeon 7000 series, AMD had support for PRT in hardware.
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Both are currently bad ideas ...
With megatextures you you have to manually do texture filtering in the pixel shader and that can get expensive if you include aniotropic filtering and with PRTs you're stalling a lot ...
