IDTech 5 should die and so should MEgatextures.

[dogen1]

Well, i finally got around to examine the issue with megatextures and idtech5. And it is true what they say about megatextures being great for scenery but wortheless for close up views. In wolfenstein new order the environment looks great. But as soon as one zooms in at for example the walls, it just looks horrible out focus and unsharp. Like a dx7 game. With more common techniques, the textures that are used to build the walls for example are replaced with textures that have more detail the closer one comes to a wall. I wonder how they solved this with idtech 6.
And the jagged edges are everywhere in the game, anti-aliasing is not present and at least not available as a setting in the game. Maybe through the command console, have not tried that.

That has nothing to do with the virtual texture tech. The Rage artists wanted to make a game without any obvious texture repetition. Problem with that is the game would be huge unless they sacrificed the quality of individual textures.

There's nothing inherent to "megatextures" that makes them low res. In fact, the technology essentially removes limits on texture resolution entirely (assuming you have enough storage space), since the game only loads in the needed texels for what's on screen. So texture memory use is basically determined by resolution.

I think with doom they re-used more textures cause it kind of fits the setting. So, they had more room for everything to be higher quality.

 

[William Gaatjes]

That has nothing to do with the virtual texture tech. The Rage artists wanted to make a game without any obvious texture repetition. Problem with that is the game would be huge unless they sacrificed the quality of individual textures.

There's nothing inherent to "megatextures" that makes them low res. In fact, the technology essentially removes limits on texture resolution entirely (assuming you have enough storage space), since the game only loads in the needed texels for what's on screen. So texture memory use is basically determined by resolution.

I think with doom they re-used more textures cause it kind of fits the setting. So, they had more room for everything to be higher quality.

Well, there are other even older games without megatextures that keep a detailed and in focus look when looking closely at the walls or other scenery. They do not have megatextures.
If megatextures only look good with hundreds of GB of data, what is the use. That is useless. I rather see use of a procedural texture generation combined with high quality unique textures than just megatextures alone.
I can imagine megatextures have some use. But as seen with idtech 5 i was not convinced. With the new wolfenstein that seems to be based on idtech 6, i will be curious to see how good the game will look.

 

[sweenish]

Their point
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You

 

[dogen1]

Well, there are other even older games without megatextures that keep a detailed and in focus look when looking closely at the walls or other scenery. They do not have megatextures.
If megatextures only look good with hundreds of GB of data, what is the use. That is useless. I rather see use of a procedural texture generation combined with high quality unique textures than just megatextures alone.
I can imagine megatextures have some use. But as seen with idtech 5 i was not convinced. With the new wolfenstein that seems to be based on idtech 6, i will be curious to see how good the game will look.

My point is that virtual textures are not megatextures (I should have made that more clear in the last post). Virtual textures = figure out what's on screen, and only load in the texels needed (essentially). Megatextures are RAGEs huge 32k*32k (mostly) non repeating textures. The reason rage was huge and still had low quality textures is because they wanted to minimize repetition as much as possible. Not because they used virtual texturing. That was used to make textures that huge actually possible.

 

[William Gaatjes]

My point is that virtual textures are not megatextures (I should have made that more clear in the last post). Virtual textures = figure out what's on screen, and only load in the texels needed (essentially). Megatextures are RAGEs huge 32k*32k (mostly) non repeating textures. The reason rage was huge and still had low quality textures is because they wanted to minimize repetition as much as possible. Not because they used virtual texturing. That was used to make textures that huge actually possible.

Megatextures are also loaded when needed so, are in a sense also virtual textures, sort of the precursor.
The idea is exactly the same, the implementation is different.
Virtual texture technology is more advanced then what megatextures could do.

 

[dogen1]

Megatextures are also loaded when needed so, are in a sense also virtual textures, sort of the precursor.
The idea is exactly the same, the implementation is different.
Virtual texture technology is more advanced then what megatextures could do.

Well, rage literally was using virtual texturing.

http://www.mrelusive.com/publications/papers/Software-Virtual-Textures.pdf

 

[William Gaatjes]

Well, rage literally was using virtual texturing.

http://www.mrelusive.com/publications/papers/Software-Virtual-Textures.pdf

Oh, i fully agree. I read that John Carmack and the id team of course refined the technology with every version of the idtech engine.
It is promising now more than ever because solid state drives are becoming more common, paving paths for very high I/O throughput.
The whole idea is just like virtual memory management. Only in the past, with slow platter hard drives, the streaming of textures could be visible at times.
Now with fast storage, no issue. I really want in the future to have a 960 pro when i finally upgrade my pc. Will be great for games to come that use idtech 6.

I do wonder, i have been reading about it. How have they solved the blurry issue with using a scope rifle with a zoom ?

 

[Red Hawk]

Is that the Argent Tower level? I've heard some areas including that tank in OpenGL with a CPU bottleneck, because OpenGL doesn't do multithreading well. The solution is to use Vulkan...but I'm pretty sure Vulkan isn't officially supported on Kepler cards. But given that people are having better results on weaker hardware than yours, I'm inclined to say it's a problem with your own setup.