Textures at 2K - 4K - and next 8K ?

[IckyATLAS]

We went from 2K to 4K textures and the difference is pretty visible when you are near the plane. The skin is also crispier.

When you look from the pilot side with 4K the rivet detail remains still blurred even if much better that at 2K. At 8K the rivet level details would become practically as true as the real ones.

I wondered if 8K textures could be handled by the IL2 graphic engine or if this is an impossibility.

After all a new generation of GPUs are on their way and they probably would be able to handle such skin texture resolution.

8K texture means  "only" 64 Million pixels to skin a complete plane that has a wingspan of about 10 meters by 10 meters of length for a large fighter.

If we take the surface of a fighter we have about roughly I guess around 60-100 square meters total skin surface say in average 80 square meters. This is 80'000'000 millimeters.

We see that with 64 Million pixels allows nearly one mm2/pixel resolution which frankly is perfect for a fighter, Even if the eye can resolve more say at about 1meter distance the skin would be photorealistic. For large bombers like the B16 or so this would not be as good.

With 2K we had about 20 mm2/pixel or roughly a surface of 4.5 mm x 4.5 mm per pixel.

With 4K we stand at 5 mm2/pixel.

 

These are the best possible ratios if all of the pixels of a texture template were used for the skin. In reality in an 8K texture a lot of pixels are lost and not all of them are used for the surface of the plane. 

Just check on a skin template and you will see that the plane wings and fuselage shapes cover only partly the available surface. So the real ratio at 8K is probably 2-3 mm2/pixel. 

At 2K this would be 40-60 mm2/pixel.

At 4K this would be around 10-15 mm2/pixel.

 

We see that if we want an excellent quality across small to average size planes 8K is the way to go and perfection lies at 16K.

 

 

 

[BlitzPig_EL]

I'd rather that we were able to place more AI units on a map and not drag down the performance of the game engine.  This will become blindingly apparent if anyone tries to make a realistic portrayal of the D-Day invasion beaches when Battle of Normandy is released.  My fear is that the whole thing will look as lifeless as no man's land in FC.

[216th_Jordan]

I'd love that for new airplanes. I always wondered the templates were not made in 8k and scaled down to 4k or 2k for use until the tech becomes available.

 

Not bummed if it does bot happen but would be nice some way in the future.

[Art-J]

One has to consider if users are willing to have their game folders more and more bloated, plus subsequent longer reinstall / update times, plus much bigger RAM and VRAM requirements. DCS with its severe disk size and memory requirements already suffers from it - for example 8K textures in MiG-21 are the main reason why its default texture folder alone is 6 GB big, while developers are planning to go back to a mix of 2k/4k/8k to optimize performance.

 

Il-2 is already getting stretched to its game engine limits, while offering good performance on mid-grade computers, which is its solid selling point.

[Danziger]

I imagine even szelljr would take much longer to paint 8k skins. I remember the jump from 2k to 4k seemed like opening up vast distances in the textures. I think I remember someone saying that they tried it already.

[RedKestrel]

1 hour ago, BlitzPig_EL said:

I'd rather that we were able to place more AI units on a map and not drag down the performance of the game engine.  This will become blindingly apparent if anyone tries to make a realistic portrayal of the D-Day invasion beaches when Battle of Normandy is released.  My fear is that the whole thing will look as lifeless as no man's land in FC.

I think this kind of thing may have been a big part of the reason they moved to deferred rendering. It moves some of the burden off of the processor to the GPU. With a more or less dedicated AI programmer it may also be possible to optimize AI decision making more to make that kind of operation more feasible than it is now. If they can streamline some of the processor-intensive tasks and offload whatever they can to the GPU, it leaves things more open for AI units. At least, that's my hope.

[Jade_Monkey]

If I remember correctly, I tried to add an 8K skin once and it was reaching a size limit.

 

You get an error message popup saying the size of the file exceeds the limit of XYZ bytes.

[Velxra]

4gb or less of video ram 2k texture more than 4gb of video ram 4k textures.

[AEthelraedUnraed]

22 minutes ago, Jade_Monkey said:

If I remember correctly, I tried to add an 8K skin once and it was reaching a size limit.

 

You get an error message popup saying the size of the file exceeds the limit of XYZ bytes.

Yes, I got the same message when I forgot to enable DXT compression on a 4k skin. Off the top of my head the limit was something like 25MB, so not that much above the size of a DXT5-compressed 4k texture which is a bit above 20MB.

[Bullets]

3 hours ago, Art-J said:

One has to consider if users are willing to have their game folders more and more bloated, plus subsequent longer reinstall / update times.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare would like to have a word with you.