What games released in the last 5 years can texture compression be disabled in?

Anarchist420

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I haven't played a whole lot of games in the last 5 years, so that's why I'm asking. There were severe texture compression artifacts (in particular the sky texture was blotchy) in Prince of Persia the Forgotten Sands which is one of the most recent games I finished. I played it in my monitors native res with highest settings (other than 4x AA than 8x) and it should've looked a lot better.

I remember Doom3 looked slightly better on ultra than on high, but that was in 2004. Lossy textures suck, no matter how "good" the lossy compression algorithm is.

Call me crazy, but I'd rather have a 512^2 lossless texture than an 8k^2 lossy texture. Texture compression never should've been invented IMO.
 

imaheadcase

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May 9, 2005
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Without texture compression you would not have the games you have today. No developer wants to make a game with another 1-4 dvds just for textures. Let alone a computer that can handle it all without slowing to a crawl loading them.

I DO however like it when they offer a texture pack to download separate for those who have the hardware. But you don't see than except for games that have smaller profiles to start with.
 

wuliheron

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Yeah, its the same problem its always been with the cheap distribution methods limiting what you could buy. Back in the days of dial-up you might feed 10 floppy disks into a computer just to load one game. Without texture compression your textures would look even worse or developers would never use it.
 

Anubis

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Rage? do the megatextures count? not sure they released the uncompressed ones but IIRC they said it was like 60 gigs just for those
 

Anarchist420

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Without texture compression you would not have the games you have today. No developer wants to make a game with another 1-4 dvds just for textures. Let alone a computer that can handle it all without slowing to a crawl loading them.

I DO however like it when they offer a texture pack to download separate for those who have the hardware. But you don't see than except for games that have smaller profiles to start with.
Not really. They would just use smaller textures. Some games have textures that are 8k x 8k. Is that really necessary?
 

imaheadcase

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Not really. They would just use smaller textures. Some games have textures that are 8k x 8k. Is that really necessary?

Yes, would you want to be the artist to draw each one of those small, and make then align correctly with the surrounding textures? Every game technology has "loop holes" to make it easier on the hardware in games, or tricks to make it seem better to the eyes.

Because you can do it does not equal you should when it comes to making games look great. :)
 

Bateluer

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This whole conversation is kinda moot. Console oriented development means that very few modern games are decent textures.
 

Dankk

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I'm not sure what you're asking, OP. Very few games give you the option to "disable texture compression" because including uncompressed textures is very un-economical to begin with.

Either that, or they make low-quality textures right from the start, so any resulting compression isn't as intense. (What do I know, though, I'm not a video game developer)

Rage? do the megatextures count? not sure they released the uncompressed ones but IIRC they said it was like 60 gigs just for those

Only 60GB? I remember them saying that if they were to release a patch with the original, raw, uncompressed HD textures for RAGE, it would be in the ballpark of ~120GB in size. Only enthusiasts would be able to run it, most people wouldn't even be able to download it in any reasonable amount of time.
 

wuliheron

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Rage? do the megatextures count? not sure they released the uncompressed ones but IIRC they said it was like 60 gigs just for those

John Carmack spoke about this year. The original uncut and uncompressed artwork for Rage came to about 1TB of mostly textures. They then cut out the textures from places you couldn't see like the top of buildings and reduced textures everywhere they could and were left with 150gb before it was compressed down to 21gb.

The real problem with such large textures is just getting your graphics card to change them fast enough on the monitor when you turn around in the game or whatever and the scene changes fast. Currently Rage does all that in software which is slow, but Doom 4 will enable hardware acceleration for the technology on the radeon 7970 which could be 2-10 times faster and capable of using your system ram as virtual ram. So assuming you have enough ram and vram you might be able to play the uncompressed version Doom 4 on a high end desktop, but we'll have to wait and see.

That's about 3 dual layer bluray disks or 35 DVDs just to get the uncompressed, but reduced textures in Rage. For the full and uncompressed textures about 20 bluray disks or 230 DVDs. Note that Microsoft has already stated that the new Xbox will not have a disk drive and there is speculation it will have some sort of cartridge system.
 

BFG10K

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Very few games allow texture compression control. It’s usually just ID’s engines along with some modern source ports for older games.

Call me crazy, but I'd rather have a 512^2 lossless texture than an 8k^2 lossy texture. Texture compression never should've been invented IMO.
That sure is crazy. What, you want games to take 1 TB like Rage would uncompressed? You going to buy one HDD for each game?
 

Barfo

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That sure is crazy. What, you want games to take 1 TB like Rage would uncompressed? You going to buy one HDD for each game?

Looks like we have texture hipsters now. What has the world come to?
 

wuliheron

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Looks like we have texture hipsters now. What has the world come to?

What it is coming to is 4k OLED monitors with with infinite contrast and outrageous color reproduction at 100,000hz. Already Apple is receiving complaints from people that normal resolution images look bad on their new iPad retina displays. The newest radeon 7970 can handle up to 32TB of textures at once and next year HP intends to release their new molecular memory with other companies soon to follow. High Def is about to become low def and look as outdated as an old CRT and by 2014 or so you computer will be as outdated as an old 386.
 

StinkyPinky

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What it is coming to is 4k OLED monitors with with infinite contrast and outrageous color reproduction at 100,000hz. Already Apple is receiving complaints from people that normal resolution images look bad on their new iPad retina displays. The newest radeon 7970 can handle up to 32TB of textures at once and next year HP intends to release their new molecular memory with other companies soon to follow. High Def is about to become low def and look as outdated as an old CRT and by 2014 or so you computer will be as outdated as an old 386.

ew2.jpg
 

imaheadcase

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May 9, 2005
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What it is coming to is 4k OLED monitors with with infinite contrast and outrageous color reproduction at 100,000hz. Already Apple is receiving complaints from people that normal resolution images look bad on their new iPad retina displays. The newest radeon 7970 can handle up to 32TB of textures at once and next year HP intends to release their new molecular memory with other companies soon to follow. High Def is about to become low def and look as outdated as an old CRT and by 2014 or so you computer will be as outdated as an old 386.

Did someone smack you with a stupid stick?
 

wuliheron

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Great picture.

I know it sounds strange, but even without waiting for OLED prices to come down manufacturers are already adapting their existing lines with new technology to produce cheap ultra high definition displays and prices should drop dramatically in the next few years.

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/39952/?p1=MstRcnt

HP has stated within the next year they will ship the first 5nm memristor replacements for flash and within five years at most dram will be history. They've already offered to stack 2gb of memristors on top of Intel's next Haswell chip. Even if HP's claims about dram are wrong, there are dozens of competing technologies maturing as we speak and the only real question is which will replace dram and how soon. Some have 10x the bandwidth and use a fraction of the power of dram, while at 5nm its hard to imagine getting much smaller then memristors. Booting your computer is about to become history. You'll turn it on, and it will be right where you left off.

http://www.dailytech.com/HP+to+Depl...Replacement+Within+18+Months/article22963.htm

Both AMD and Intel have said by 2014 they will have unified their new cpu/gpu architectures and produce the first hardware acceleration for transactional memory. That essentially means the chips will to some extent thread themselves and be significantly easier for programmers to code for multicore and parallel processing. Rumor has it Haswell is already 2-3 times faster for graphics then ivy bridge.
 
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imaheadcase

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We have been hearing about OLED prices coming down for 5+ years. In fact its going backwards, most TV manufacturer have closed down production it deeming it to expensive.

If you remember we have had demos shown at almost all tech conventions to day, with ZERO seeing production.

Not saying it will not eventually come to light, or something else, but its just tiresome to hear people saying "its coming soon".

Goes the same with lots of technology. Fact is before some of this stuff comes to light you will be to old to care and more worried about if you can get a house/apartment without stairs because it hurts to go up them with bad hips.
 

Anarchist420

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Very few games allow texture compression control. It’s usually just ID’s engines along with some modern source ports for older games.


That sure is crazy. What, you want games to take 1 TB like Rage would uncompressed? You going to buy one HDD for each game?
Thanks for answering my question:)
It couldn't take 1 TB of hard drive space if the files were losslessly compressed. Lossless compression would probably get it down to 850GB or less. Then, reducing the detail to half of what they were would then be 425 GB.

My point is that I personally don't think textures should be 8k x 8k or even 4k x 4k. I know Rage wouldn't be Rage without super detailed textures, but still. In addition to that, the texture files can be losslessly compressed which results in a minimum of 5% reduction, but generally a lot more than that.

1k x 1k x RGBA16FP (with nvidia High Quality filtering) non lossy is good enough for me.
 
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lamedude

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So the OP is the only person that prefer's UT99's low res textures over the S3TC texture pack?
 

wuliheron

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We have been hearing about OLED prices coming down for 5+ years. In fact its going backwards, most TV manufacturer have closed down production it deeming it to expensive.

If you remember we have had demos shown at almost all tech conventions to day, with ZERO seeing production.

Not saying it will not eventually come to light, or something else, but its just tiresome to hear people saying "its coming soon".

Goes the same with lots of technology. Fact is before some of this stuff comes to light you will be to old to care and more worried about if you can get a house/apartment without stairs because it hurts to go up them with bad hips.

Check the link I provided:

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/39952/?p1=MstRcnt

Manufacturers are already adapting their existing lines to provide cheap ultra high resolution LCD displays. This isn't speculation, experimental, or a demo. These are all real technologies coming to market within the next two years at most.