High Resolution texture pack available for DA2

[sticks435]

Hey guys,

Those of you who have cards with 1024 megs of memory can grab the high res textures from here. Note that most of the improvements will only be seen on DX11 cards when playing very high settings.

http://social.bioware.com/page/da2-patches

 

[darkewaffle]

Hm, wonder how much of this my 5770 can handle at 1680x1050. Could be pretty.

 

[thilanliyan]

It's great they're doing this. Kudos to Bioware.

Although they should have included it originally, it is a bit better than getting a straight port.

 

[Lonyo]

Day 0 texture pack? And they couldn't have just shipped this with the game?

It's nice and all, it's just a bit WTF.

 

[sigurros81]

Day 0 texture pack? And they couldn't have just shipped this with the game?

It's nice and all, it's just a bit WTF.

Probably because they forgot to include it in the game. They ported the console version to PC and completely conveniently forgot about all the high res textures. Makes for good marketing because all the idiots will think "wow, Bioware loves us because they just released a high res texture pack!." Amirite?

 

[sticks435]

Day 0 texture pack? And they couldn't have just shipped this with the game? It's nice and all, it's just a bit WTF.

Probably because they forgot to include it in the game. They ported the console version to PC and completely forgot about all the high res textures.

They weren't finished in time to put on the disk. Bioware worked on them after the game had been locked down and sent to Cert testing. Guessing it was either this, not have them at all, or delay the game. All of which would make people unhappy.

 

[Rhezuss]

To buy, or not to buy...

 

[KaOTiK]

To buy, or not to buy...

Wait a year for the ultimate edition with all the DLC and it is on sale for at least half off.

 

[Skurge]

DA2 was already looking great with all the DX11 additions. I thought the textures could use some work. Its going to look even better now.

 

[darkewaffle]

Not that they couldn't have included it, but depending on the size of the texture pack (I can't tell from here) it could have been a financial decision to save on bandwidth or printing discs (Perhaps it put them over the threshold of a single DVD or something). I mean if it requires a DX11 card with 1GB of ram it probably won't even be applicable to a lot of players anyway.

 

[Throckmorton]

Let me know when the nude mod comes out.

 

[sticks435]

Not that they couldn't have included it, but depending on the size of the texture pack (I can't tell from here) it could have been a financial decision to save on bandwidth or printing discs (Perhaps it put them over the threshold of a single DVD or something). I mean if it requires a DX11 card with 1GB of ram it probably won't even be applicable to a lot of players anyway.

It's 1.08 gigs, the game itself is like 6.5 on disc or something like that. 7 to 7.5 once it's installed. It doesn't absolutely require a DX11 card, but for all intents and purposes you won't get most of the benefits if you don't have one.

 

[motsm]

Hi res textures only for DX11? If there is no work around, Bioware is now on my sh*t list.

 

[sticks435]

Im gonna guess it's because they use larger amounts of tessellation. Couldn't say for sure though.

 

[kami]

Hi res textures only for DX11? If there is no work around, Bioware is now on my sh*t list.

Calm down. The only requirement to use them is a vid card with 1 gig of memory or more. It just looks better with DX11.

 

[motsm]

Calm down. The only requirement to use them is a vid card with 1 gig of memory or more. It just looks better with DX11.

Then what exactly does this mean?

Most of the benefits from the Hi-resolution textures will only be seen if you are able to run the game in DirectX 11.

Direct X 11 has nothing to do with textures. Of course Bioware is already fail with the other features they have locked out of DX9 and 10 for absolutely no reason. Just how BC2 has no soft shadows unless your running DX11; they act like it's some new feature that hasn't been around for the better half of a decade.

 

[Skurge]

Then what exactly does this mean?

Direct X 11 has nothing to do with textures. Of course Bioware is already fail with the other features they have locked out of DX9 and 10 for absolutely no reason. Just how BC2 has no soft shadows unless your running DX11; they act like it's some new feature that hasn't been around for the better half of a decade.

I think you need to read that again, It says nothing about needing a DX11 card to use the textures, but probably that they look best when used with the other DX11 stuff.

Its also not just about adding features, its about performance too. Even today, FEAR has a huge hit when you turn soft shadows on (game is still playable, but imagine that kind of hit when you arent runnning at 150FPS+) and they don't even look that great.

 

[NoSoup4You]

This is awesome, they didn't have to do this and Dragon Age Origins had horrificly low-res textures so it would've been easy to just give us more of the same with DA2.

Am I thrilled with every change they made for the sequel, not even close. But this is awesome, super psyched that the PC version is getting even better.

 

[gothamhunter]

PC gaming has become more "mainstream" as of late, so they probably just included the normal textures for the "normal" PC gamer, and then added the high-res textures to be available for those who can use it. Not only that, but it's 1.08GB in size - depending on how they shipped the game, there might have not been space for it. It reminds me of LOTRO; they have the normal game download, and also a high-res texture download that's quite a bit larger in size.

 

[motsm]

I think you need to read that again, It says nothing about needing a DX11 card to use the textures, but probably that they look best when used with the other DX11 stuff.

Its also not just about adding features, its about performance too. Even today, FEAR has a huge hit when you turn soft shadows on (game is still playable, but imagine that kind of hit when you arent runnning at 150FPS+) and they don't even look that great.

DirectX 11 won't make your soft shadows magically way faster, it's all marketing gibberish. The fact that almost every single PC gamer buys into it almost instantly is what bugs me, I didn't think the community was that naive.

Most of these DirectX11 games just make the DX9 and 10 versions uglier than they could be to make the DX11 version look better by comparison. Crytek did it with the original Crysis by blocking out the very high settings if you didn't have DX10, meanwhile if you enabled those settings in DX9 mode, it ran every one of them better, at the same visual quality.

Just look at the DX9 version of DAII, the textures are lower resolution for no reason, they don't appear to even have bump mapping, they certainly don't have POM's, and the shadows look on par or worse than Nocturne from over 11 years ago, which runs on DirectX7.

Even if there was validity to meaningful performance gains under DX11, the fact that they purposely gimp the DX9 and 10 versions is reason enough for me to dislike them.

 

[sticks435]

DX11 screenshots. I believe these are also with the high res pack.

http://img232.imageshack.us/g/2011030700001.jpg/

 

[NoSoup4You]

This isn't Bioware's fault - I'm guessing there are incentives to publishers (EA, 2K...etc.) to have DX11 features included, this was definitely true with games surrounding the launch of DX10 and Vista. Crysis had bogus "DX10" features which worked under DX9 with better performance, Bioshock had a ridiculous "DX10-only" feature which produced ripples in the water as you walked, the idea that this stuff couldn't be done is laughable...

There has to be some monetary incentive, either that or just the positive PR from sticking that DX11 sticker on the box or something... not sure.

Legitimately, how many games are there that truly utilize DX11 or 10? Metro2033 seemed to me like it might be one. I'm specifically questioning whether the same effects could be produced under DX9, not whether the game actually allows you to use them under DX9.

Any others?

 

[sticks435]

Here are the dev comments from the thread about the texture pack and why DX11 sees the most benefits.

Just to clarify that you do NOT need to have a DX11 capable GPU to use the high resolution textures. To get the full benefit you need to run the game using the DirectX 11 renderer, which is backwards compatible with DX10. So even if you have a DX10 GPU (and Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7) you'll still be able to run the game using the DirectX 11 renderer.

If you can only play using the DirectX 9 renderer you'll still get a small benefit out of the texture pack. In particular certain character textures will look nicer, but most of the benefits on the environments don't apply to DX9. The reason for this is technical, and it has to do with the maximum texture sizes allowed by the DX9 vs DX11 APIs.

Even if you have less than 1 gig of vram, by all means go ahead and experiment with the download. At worst case the game will run very slowly when hi-res textures are enabled, but if that happens it's easy to turn the hi-res textures off from the video options menu. The amount of the slowdown could vary depending on where you are in the game and how much memory exactly you have.

We've added the 1GB as a guideline so people know what kind of hardware will support this glitch free, but if you're willing to get some performance impact you should still download the texture pack and experiment with it.

 

[motsm]

Ok, so they are BSing us even more.

The reason for this is technical, and it has to do with the maximum texture sizes allowed by the DX9 vs DX11 APIs.

The maximum texture size that I know of for DX9, is 4096X4096. They aren't using textures that large, and basically no game in history has used them with any amount of regularity.

 

[darkewaffle]

Has anyone had any luck installing this yet? I'm not sure if I'm having a problem because I have DA2 on steam, it's just 'pre-loaded' and not 'installed' yet, or both.