this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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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.
...
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.
...
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.