And so on with the tech stuff regarding 4k and 8 texture usage.
If someone generally says theyre using 4k and 8k for textures, it strongly suggests that this is per texture per face or per texture per object (uv packing),
the average color 4k texture has the following sizes (for most common game formats)
JPG = 25mb
PNG = 29mb
DDS (DXT5) = 22mb
BMP = 49mb
TGA = 49mb
and then average color texture in 8k.
JPG = 119,9mb
PNG = 129.6mb
DDS (DXT5) = 87.4mb
BMP = 196.6mb
TGA = 196.6mb
On average engine side crompression on image data is minimal and usually only for storage, unpacked into memory where the full size effects the allocation, so if we had a game that had no other data to be put into memory what so ever other than texture data, at 8k the wiius theoretical maximum (hardware limited and ignoring OS footprint and reservation) would be basically 10 8k textures, this would take up 95% of the total system memory, when you add back in OS footprint and a realistic allocation of roughly 45% memory usage for ai, mesh, sound and script that number drops to just 5 to 6 8k textures, clearly of no real use or benefit for a game targetting 720p.
Calculations for the same in 4k suggest a theoretical maximum of 60-90 total depending on format, then real-world of around 40-55 total for an actual game.
Thus the idea of them using 4k or 8k texture data heavilly for the game is highly suspect, its far more likely that they are uv packing into 4k and 8k files entire collections with different coordinates for different meshes uv data, this is essentially the same as taking multiple singular textures and sticking them together into one file, it reduces the overhead from file access and read/write at the cost of needing to load the entire file, however since its a racer, that can be done.
That's before getting into the sticky subject of muxing lower quality samples for lod, detail textures, uv maps, lightmaps bump maps or shaders using said texture data, too, all of which inflate the overall vram requirement of each textured surface.
UV packing multiple textures in to a single file however, isnt really using 8k textures, because the singular objects do not have the texture clarity of an 8k asset, and suggesting that the game is using 4k or 8k textures when its simply uv packing is both extremely misleading and essentially a bare faced lie.
The vram needed to use 4k and 8k textures extensively puts it out of the realms of even high end modes on pc games because all but the most rediculously expensive graphics cards lack the actual, physical memory to do so.
