this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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Yep, 4k textures, very high quality audio files and FMVs are very big and essentially impossible to meaningfully compress.
If you are saying its the art teams that are to blame... uh, they get their budget, headcount, marching orders... from managment, their team leads... right?
You could always have managment hire other artists with different skillsets... make different decisions about what level of resolution, fidelity, overall number of distinct textures, etc, is actually needed...
A video game is the sum of its parts... and there are teamleads in charge of each of those parts departments, who then hire for those departments, and then you have management and/or some kind of overall creative director(s) in charge of the... entire recipe of exactly what is going to be baked into the proverbial cake.
It is these people's jobs to come up with an overall vision, and then ensure it is implemented on time, within the budget.
You know, 'manage' the game's development.
Their overall 'recipes' including stupid huge texture sizes and what not... thats a choice, not some kind of God given or fundamentally unbreakable scientific, natural law of gaming.
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As of the latest Steam Hardware Survey, about 7% of PC gamers have a 4K monitor.
Far more console players have a 4K capable TV, but it doesn't really matter because no currently existing, or announced, upcoming console... none of them can actually, truly render anything with detailed, super realistic graphics at 4k 60 fps... to hit that, they have to use checkerboard rendering + frame upscaling tech... which makes the actual render resolution at 2K or less... often even 4K30fps is often still reliant on checkerboard / frame upscaling.
'4K' on a gaming console isn't actually 4K, all that extra detail usually just gets wasted anyway, blurred out or otherwise lost by the checkerboard rendering or frame upscaling.
Generally speaking, the only games on consoles that can actually run at actual 4K are the not hyper realistic graphics games, they are the ones with simplified or stylized art.
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Acting as if 4k and 8k textures are some kind of mandatory minimum that must be included in all releases of all games is ludicrous.
As Felix points out... just make these high end textures an optional, free DLC.
The AAA gaming industry has largely done the same thing the car and housing industries have done in the last decade: Everything for sale is now a high end luxury item, there are no more economy class cars, no more new, modest apartments.
This is insane and is fundamentally mismatched with the consumer base, especially right now as the US in particular, and broader world economy looks set for a serious downturn, which will obviously see less spending on emtertainment.
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Also sure, I'll give you that No Mans Sky is rather stylized, but they also recently released a massive graphical overhaul update that adds in those super high quality textures... and its still just a bit over 20 gigs of on disk space on my system.
If you think MGS V and SOMA and Alien Isolation have 'highly stylized graphics', not graphics which basically aim at being very realistic and true to life... with a bit of stylization thrown into character design / world design / etc ... I don't know what to say, I don't know how you can say those games are 'highly stylized' in the way that like... Windwaker or Valheim or Selaco are.
4k textures do not become magically useless when you have a 1080p monitor. The thing about video games is that the player can generally move their head anywhere they want, including going very close to any texture.
Oof you really don't know how any of this works, do you?
Unless we are talking about some kind of... gridded out master texture map that has a whole bunch of textures common to say a particular level, a particular biome or environment's commonly used asset set, and then the game addresses sections of this one large image as the particular textures of particular objects... and that master file is 4K or larger, and just always kept in memory for say a particular level...
Then uh, no, if you have a 1080p monitor, and your entire screen is filled up in game by say a 4k texture of a wall, or a poster or something...
All you are doing is pushing 4x the pixels through the game and your system to ultimately still render at a maximum of the 1080p your monitor can show you... for every single texture in the game.
This is why it often doesn't even make sense to run a more modern game at very high or ultra texture settings on a 1080p display... you just literally cannot see the difference, and all it does is slow down the game and your system.
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You'd get better image quality and performance from having a 1080p texture, Anisotropic Filtering, and perhaps some degree of some kind of Anti Aliasing.
There are a small number of games that allow you to render the entire game at say, 105, 110, 125% your actual display resolution, and use that in lieu of Anti Aliasing... and in those scenarios, having your textures at 125% of 1080p can improve image quality by reducing jaggies in a much more brute force way.
But this is not usually done very often, because while yes, this can provide superior image quality to using many kinds of Anti Aliasing, it is usually massively less performant and will degrade your FPS significantly.
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There are a myriad of possible scenarios where it could make sense for a certain class of textures in a particular game and engine might be significantly larger than the textures for common objects amd buildings and such.... but that would be an extremely in depth, technical, specific and particular, case by case discussion.
In a video game, you can walk up close enough to a wall that only 5% of the texture fills your entire screen. That means the texture is very zoomed in and you can clearly see the lack of detail in even a 4k texture, even when on a 1080p monitor.
You're also not "pushing 4x the pixels through the game" the only possible performance downside is the vram usage (and probably slightly less efficient sampling)
If that is happening, the game designer is either incompetent and doesn't know how to scale/asymetrically tile/uvmap/mipmap/use emergent detail maps/etc their textures and models properly, or coordinate level design with objects properly for such obects being viewed extremely up close or with extreme zoom... or they just don't care to, either out of laziness, time constraints, targeted hardware limiting performance constraints, fundamental engine capability constraints, or intentional art style direction.
If your game is commonly causing situations where a 1080p texture is being viewed so closely that it is just showing you a stretched out, low res mess... you most likely aren't scaling mipmaps adequately for your level design and object placement.
These video explain some of these concepts within UE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhDatVm6C6U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pcm6SrfgnvA
And here's an overview of how to asymetrically (not a simple repeating grid) tile large scale textures, to achieve a better looking large in game object with clever, repeated use of a single, smaller base texture, or overlayed noise maps, secondary textures, bump/normal/shadow maps, etc, within Blender.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0Mc8fjSAA0
And absolutely yes, if all the textures in a complex scene being rendered are 4K instead of 1080p, yes, every texture has 4x as many pixels, uses 4x as much vram, 4x as much system ram, is 4x more expensive to push into the entire render pipeline, etc, which will significantly lessen performance on most systems in most common situations.