IL-2 series of games: what's the exact resolution when in 4k?

[343KKT_Kintaro]

There are three generations of IL-2 Sturmovik games. My impression is that efforts are being made so that all three reach the 4k resolution... Am I wrong?

 

So, what's the exact peak of resolution for each game? My guessing goes as follows:

 

IL-2 1946 = Not yet in 4k res? If it's not, makes this sense to expect it goes someday to 4k?

 

IL-2 Great Battles = 3840 x 2160 ?

 

IL-2 Cliffs of Dover = 3440 x 1440 ?

 

Please let me know if the above is correct...

[Picchio]

19 minutes ago, 343KKT_Kintaro said:

There are three generations of IL-2 Sturmovik games. My impression is that efforts are being made so that all three reach the 4k resolution... Am I wrong?

 

So, what's the exact peak of resolution for each game? My guessing goes as follows:

 

IL-2 1946 = Not yet in 4k res? If it's not, makes this sense to expect it goes someday to 4k?

 

IL-2 Great Battles = 3840 x 2160 ?

 

IL-2 Cliffs of Dover = 3440 x 1440 ?

 

Please let me know if the above is correct...

 

I think that's not quite correct and it's a bit of a funny idea  no offense!

Anyway, what is generally referred to when mentioning 4K in this sim is merely the resolution of its aircraft skins.

The screen resolution at which you're playing the game is another matter entirely: any game can be run at 4K (3840x2160) or any other resolution available to either your display or GPU.

Edited March 18, 2022 by Picchio

[PaladinX]

You can play any game in any resolution that your display supports.

Classic FullHD (1920x1080)...QHD...WQHD (2560x1440)...UWQHD (3440x1440)...4K (3840x2160)...and many resolutions in between...

Nothing to do with the game itself...

[343KKT_Kintaro]

 

11 minutes ago, Picchio said:

It's not correct and that's quite a funny idea  no offense!

 

 

 

Oh no, no ofence, no worries, no problem.

 

 

11 minutes ago, Picchio said:

Anyway, what is generally referred to when mentioning 4K in this sim is merely the resolution of its aircraft skins.

 

I think resolution applies to terrain and scenery as well. Any object showing "surfaces" and, thus, textures.

 

 

11 minutes ago, Picchio said:

The screen resolution at which you're playing the game is another matter entirely: any game can be run at 4K (3840x2160) or any other resolution available to either your display or GPU.

 

1 minute ago, PaladinX said:

You can play any game in any resolution that your display supports.

Classic FullHD (1920x1080)...QHD...WQHD (2560x1440)...UWQHD (3440x1440)...4K (3840x2160)...and many resolutions in between...

Nothing to do with the game itself...

 

I know! My point is to determine if whether or not the default textures in the game are preset in 4k by the game so that a 4k monitor or a 4k VR headset are perfectly adapted to it.

 

Same as in the Great Battles series there's a 4k box you can tick or untick, in principle the Dover series will soon present a 4k box intended to be ticked or unticked by the player.

Recent screenshots I've seen, from both Great Battles and Dover, show resolutions of 3840 x 2160 for Great Battles and 3440 x 1440 for Dover. This is why I'm asking about the peak of potential resolution for each game.

 

[PaladinX]

But you were asking for 4k resolution, not for 4k textures, which is another context.

Of course a 21 years old game (the original IL2 Sturmovik) does not provide 4k textures...

[343KKT_Kintaro]

1 minute ago, PaladinX said:

But you were asking for 4k resolution, not for 4k textures, which is another context.

 

 

Oh, sorry for the wrong wording.

 

 

1 minute ago, PaladinX said:

Of course a 21 years old game (the original IL2 Sturmovik) does not provide 4k textures...

 

 

It sounds odd to me that a game cannot evolve into further resolution of its textures because of its age. I'll go to the 1946 forum for that question.

 

Thank you for your time Paladinx, that was very nice from you trying to answer my questions.

 

 

[Jade_Monkey]

I think there is a misunderstanding of what 4k textures means. It just means the template used for that particular texture has 4096x4096 pixels, nothing to do with monitor resolution.

 

So imagine you have a sheet of those dimensions you need to wrap around a plane to cover all textures, the higher the resolution of the texture, the better looking skin of the plane since you can fit more detail into that sheet.

 

4K textures will still look great in a 1080p monitor.

[343KKT_Kintaro]

46 minutes ago, Jade_Monkey said:

I think there is a misunderstanding of what 4k textures means. It just means the template used for that particular texture has 4096x4096 pixels, nothing to do with monitor resolution.

 

So imagine you have a sheet of those dimensions you need to wrap around a plane to cover all textures, the higher the resolution of the texture, the better looking skin of the plane since you can fit more detail into that sheet.

 

4K textures will still look great in a 1080p monitor.

 

 

 

I get it, no worries, but at this point my Great Battles game gives me the impression it identifies my screen resolution as the maximum allocated resolution in the graphics settings goes up to 1920 x 1080 px in my case. What about a player using a 3840 × 2160 monitor? would he seeing, in his graphics settings an array of resolutions going upt to 3840 × 2160 ?

 

 

Edited March 18, 2022 by 343KKT_Kintaro
"1960 x 1080" -> "1920 1080"

[Jade_Monkey]

Yes. I think it just depends on the availability of resolutions detected by the GPU.

 

I know you can create new resolutions in Nvidia drivers (larger than your monitors) and apply super sampling that way too).

 

That made up resolution will also show up in game.

[Art-J]

There are vids on youtube of people playing even old '46 in 4K, so I'd say Jade_Monkey is right (although I don't know if such high resolutions were supported in vanilla '46 or were added by modders).

[IckyATLAS]

8 minutes ago, 343KKT_Kintaro said:

 

 

 

I get it, no worries, but at this point my Great Battles game gives me the impression it identifies my screen resolution as the maximum allocated resolution in the graphics settings goes up to 1920 x 1080 px in my case. What about a player using a 3840 × 2160 monitor? would he seeing, in his graphics settings an array of resolutions going upt to 3840 × 2160 ?

 

 

You are perfectly right. My native screen resolution is 4K on a 43" screen (no VR). I use this machine for work and gaming and it is set to 3840x2160.

Il2 plays automatically at this resolution. On such a big screen anything less is not good looking anyway. The larger the screen the higher the resolution to keep up the image quality, but you need also to provide a GPU able to handle all those 8Million texels fast enough (at 120 FPS that is nearly 1 Billion texels per second)  and a CPU able to feed such a powerful GPU. Finally it is a chain of elements and the last element in the chain is the screen. If this one is high-end but all that comes before is low-end it won't work well and it is not worth upgrading just the screen.

 

[343KKT_Kintaro]

Those things are becoming clearer and clearer in my mind... thank you fellas, I'll try to keep learning.

 

 

[AEthelraedUnraed]

3 hours ago, 343KKT_Kintaro said:

I know! My point is to determine if whether or not the default textures in the game are preset in 4k by the game so that a 4k monitor or a 4k VR headset are perfectly adapted to it.

Just to clarify a bit more beyond what Jade_Monkey has already said, below is the 4k texture of a P-48D22:

It's tremendously downscaled here, of course, but the real texture is 4096 pixels by 4096 pixels. 1k in computer terms is generally 1024, so hence the name 4k (4*1024=4096). That means the total number of pixels is 4096*4096=16,777,216 pixels. You can recognise the upper side of the wings in the topmost part of the image, covering let's say one fifth of all pixels, so 16,777,216/5~3,000,000 pixels that are used for the top wings *at most*.

 

"At most", because if you're looking at the P-47 from a distance of many kilometres, on your screen this will be only one or two pixels. In that case, only a few of those 16 million pixels are used because your graphics card would melt if you'd try to combine all those pixels into the one or two visible on screen - and do the same thing for all other aircraft and objects.

 

If, on the other hand, you're sitting in the cockpit and are looking down on the wings, it does matter. The wing area of the P-47 is 27.9 square metres. Let's round up to 30. That means that the 3,000,000 pixels of the upper wing cover 3,000,000/30=100,000 pixels per square meter, equals 10 pixels per square cm, equals a "real life pixel size" of rougly 3 by 3 mm. Meaning that a dot of 3 by 3 mm is the smallest detail you can see if fully zoomed in. That's about the size of an ant. Pretty neat, eh?

 

So that's the *maximum* amount of detail this 4k skin can give you. If you move the camera till you almost touch the wing, or zoom in tremendously much, this ant-size dot might fill half your screen, much like an ant appears big if you hold it right in front of your eyes. No matter if your screen is 4k or whatever resolution; this time you only see a couple of pixels and each pixel of the texture covers thousands of pixels of your screen.

 

You see now the problem of comparing screen size with texture size? There's no simple way of saying how many texture pixels fit to how many screen pixels, and hence no way a 4k monitor or VR headset can in any way be more "adapted" to 4k textures than a lower-resolution monitor. Besides screen size and texture size, it also depends heavily on the location and zoom of the camera and the size of the object. For small or faraway objects, 4k is not better than 1k or even less since we cannot fit so many texture pixels into so few screen pixels anyhow. Only for very large or close-by objects does 4k really make a difference, in which case it simply increases the amount of detail that *can* be shown on screen.

 

Perhaps a bit abstract and a little bit of maths, but I hope it at least gives you some idea of how things work and what 4k textures mean, and how this doesn't really relate to screen size.

 

EDIT: I'm glossing over techniques such as mipmapping and supersampling here, but it's a roughly accurate description of what's going on

Edited March 18, 2022 by AEthelraedUnraed

[ShamrockOneFive]

4 hours ago, 343KKT_Kintaro said:

I know! My point is to determine if whether or not the default textures in the game are preset in 4k by the game so that a 4k monitor or a 4k VR headset are perfectly adapted to it.

 

In the gentlest of ways... that's not how this works.

 

4K is a shorthand for a resolution 3840x2160. That gives us the number of unique pixels represented horizontally and vertically. It can be applied to a screen such as a 4K monitor or it can be applied to a texture file which is then draped over a 3D model in a game engine such as the one that IL-2 uses. You can have a screen with a quarter of the resolution of a 4K monitor and still see the difference between a 1K, 2K, or 4K texture by how close you get to it from within the game not by the total resolution of the screen.

 

They are measuring the same things but they don't apply in the same way.

[343KKT_Kintaro]

  

1 hour ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

You see now the problem of comparing screen size with texture size? There's no simple way of saying how many texture pixels fit to how many screen pixels, and hence no way a 4k monitor or VR headset can in any way be more "adapted" to 4k textures than a lower-resolution monitor. Besides screen size and texture size, it also depends heavily on the location and zoom of the camera and the size of the object. For small or faraway objects, 4k is not better than 1k or even less since we cannot fit so many texture pixels into so few screen pixels anyhow. Only for very large or close-by objects does 4k really make a difference, in which case it simply increases the amount of detail that *can* be shown on screen.

 

 

Thank you for all the explanations that so clearly led to the above quoted paragraph. I think I got it.

 

 

1 hour ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

Perhaps a bit abstract and a little bit of maths, but I hope it at least gives you some idea of how things work and what 4k textures mean, and how this doesn't really relate to screen size.

 

 

So, textures resolution is not related to screen size, nor screen size is related to textures resolution... but, nevertheless, we need an appropriate video card same as we need an appropriate simulator (core engine that supports the 4k range) if we want to properly see on screen a P-47 that would be clothed with a 4k skin... correct?

 

By the way, that was interesting to read about those numbers, AEthelraedUnraed. Indeed, in my views, the terms "1k", "2k" or "4k" apply to "resolution ranges" more than to absolute numbers. Games I played years ago, like "Chuck Yeager's Air Combat" or "Red Baron 3D", fitted well in my monitor when the latter was set in 800x600 px. Such a resolution, to me, falls into the "1k" range ("close" to 1000 px in its longest side). For years now, my current monitor reaches a maximum width of 1920 pixels and this is why I consider that, in the present day, I play my Great Battles game in the "2k" range (1920 is a bit less than 2000 pixels). So, for the "4k" range, I was assuming that a monitor that is set into, let's say, a maximum of 3440 x 1440... is an example of 4k because it exceeds 3000 pixels in width... in spite of not reaching 4000.

 

Going back to this P-47 skin which is in 4096x4096px: if we want the terrain or the scenery are in 4k too... do we need the same amount of pixels we have in the P-47's skin? (I mean at the same scale, in the same simulated environment, the same amount of pixels fitted in an equivalent surface).

 

 

27 minutes ago, ShamrockOneFive said:

 

In the gentlest of ways... that's not how this works.

 

4K is a shorthand for a resolution 3840x2160. That gives us the number of unique pixels represented horizontally and vertically. It can be applied to a screen such as a 4K monitor or it can be applied to a texture file which is then draped over a 3D model in a game engine such as the one that IL-2 uses. You can have a screen with a quarter of the resolution of a 4K monitor and still see the difference between a 1K, 2K, or 4K texture by how close you get to it from within the game not by the total resolution of the screen.

 

They are measuring the same things but they don't apply in the same way.

 

 

Yep, this is more or less what AEthelraedUnraed was trying to leave clear. Makes no sens that a game "is preset in 4k"... I think I got it, but... does it make sens if I say that a game "allows" or "supports" terminal resolutions for the player that are equivalent to a 4k resolution in his monitor or in his VR headset? I may be wrong, but from my point of view, not all depends on the video card, nor on the processor, nor on the hardware (if monitor or VR headset). The game itself must be able to run the 4k skins in the planes, for example. Was Battle of Stalingrad, at release in 2013/2014, able to show textures in 4k in a 4k monitor? Wasn't this reached later, in further steps of the game development?

 

Please guys be indulgent, I'm trying to understand how these things work...

 

 

 

[ShamrockOneFive]

15 minutes ago, 343KKT_Kintaro said:

Yep, this is more or less what AEthelraedUnraed was trying to leave clear. Makes no sens that a game "is preset in 4k"... I think I got it, but... does it make sens if I say that a game "allows" or "supports" terminal resolutions for the player that are equivalent to a 4k resolution in his monitor or in his VR headset? I may be wrong, but from my point of view, not all depends on the video card, nor on the processor, nor on the hardware (if monitor or VR headset). The game itself must be able to run the 4k skins in the planes, for example. Was Battle of Stalingrad, at release in 2013/2014, able to show textures in 4k in a 4k monitor? Wasn't this reached later, in further steps of the game development?

 

You're getting there

 

You are correct that the game must be able to support rendering pixels on the screen. In the old days most games were made to run at only one or two resolutions and most of the artwork, interface, and assets were designed around that resolution. That's why when we see remasters of those games the user interface has be updated. IL-2's user interface is using vectors (mathematical equations) rather than bitmaps (pixel based art) so there are few limitations on what resolution could be supported. The next jump is 8K and I'm betting IL-2 could support that pretty quickly if anyone had hardware to run it.

 

None of that has anything to do with the textures on airplanes, scenery, objects, etc. You can untick the 4K texture box right now, run IL-2 in a 4K resolution, and it doesn't matter. Yes the texture will be blurrier but they would have been blurrier on other screen resolutions too.

 

The IL-2 devs could throw in a box with a texture resolution of 2 pixels by 2 pixels and it'd still render fine. In beautiful, sharp, 4K resolution. The object texture would, however, be VERY blurry depending on how big or how close you got to it inside the sim world.

[AEthelraedUnraed]

17 minutes ago, 343KKT_Kintaro said:

 So, textures resolution is not related to screen size, nor screen size is related to textures resolution... but, nevertheless, we need an appropriate video card same as we need an appropriate simulator (core engine that supports the 4k range) if we want to properly see on screen a P-47 that would be clothed with a 4k skin... correct?

Absolutely. First of all, the CPU, RAM and GPU all must be capable of handling the 4k textures. Then, there's the game itself. Programmers might try to optimise a game by assuming a certain resolution in order to streamline things. If the resolution is radically different, it might mess things up. Or more frequently, they haven't optimised a game enough. If you try to load a new texture every millisecond, that might not be a problem if the texture is 256x256 pixels but it may well be if it's 4k. Likewise if you want to store a thousand textures in memory.

 

21 minutes ago, 343KKT_Kintaro said:

By the way, that was interesting to read about those numbers, AEthelraedUnraed. Indeed, in my views, the terms "1k", "2k" or "4k" apply to "resolution ranges" more than to absolute numbers. Games I played years ago, like "Chuck Yeager's Air Combat" or "Red Baron 3D", fitted well in my monitor when the latter was set in 800x600 px. Such a resolution, to me, falls into the "1k" range ("close" to 1000 px in its longest side). For years now, my current monitor reaches a maximum width of 1920 pixels and this is why I consider that, in the present day, I play my Great Battles game in the "2k" range (1920 is a bit less than 2000 pixels). So, for the "4k" range, I was assuming that a monitor that is set into, let's say, a maximum of 3440 x 1440... is an example of 4k because it exceeds 3000 pixels in width... in spite of not reaching 4000.

Yeah, well, there aren't really any official standards. Several manufacturers have different resolutions. Just looking at wikipedia gives the following options for 4k: 4096x2160, 3996x2160, 4096x1716, 3840x2160, 3840x1644, 4096x3072. And there are others. If it's anywhere near 4000 pixels wide, it's called 4k.

 

When talking about textures, however, 4k pretty strictly means 4096x4096

 

27 minutes ago, 343KKT_Kintaro said:

Going back to this P-47 skin which is in 4096x4096px: if we want the terrain or the scenery are in 4k too... do we need the same amount of pixels we have in the P-47's skin? (I mean at the same scale, in the same simulated environment, the same amount of pixels fitted in an equivalent surface).

Terrain is a bit harder. A P-47 is one object. You can use one skin for the whole object.

 

The terrain, however, is a different story. The tiny Lapino map is something like 40 by 40 km. That means that a 4k texture would have one pixel for every 10m. Might look good if you're up high, but if you're flying low it'll look horrible. That's why the terrain is repeated every few hundred metres. (Incidentally, IL2 does use 4k textures for the terrain - albeit split up into 512x512px parts, one per 800m, which gives roughly one pixel per 20cm). To avoid the pattern becoming too repetitive, there are occasionally other textures drawn on top. The same goes for towns, forests, river banks, roads, ....

 

If you're really close to the ground (e.g. taxiing or Tank Crew), 1px per 20cm is not enough, so then other textures are mixed in that will give the illusion of a much more detailed ground.

[343KKT_Kintaro]

9 minutes ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

When talking about textures, however, 4k pretty strictly means 4096x4096

 

 

 

Thank god you are here in these forums, AEthelraedUnraed as, really, I didn't know the above.

 

 

 

 

9 minutes ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

The terrain, however, is a different story. The tiny Lapino map is something like 40 by 40 km. That means that a 4k texture would have one pixel for every 10m. Might look good if you're up high, but if you're flying low it'll look horrible. That's why the terrain is repeated every few hundred metres. (Incidentally, IL2 does use 4k textures for the terrain - albeit split up into 512x512px parts, one per 800m, which gives roughly one pixel per 20cm). To avoid the pattern becoming too repetitive, there are occasionally other textures drawn on top. The same goes for towns, forests, river banks, roads, ....

 

If you're really close to the ground (e.g. taxiing or Tank Crew), 1px per 20cm is not enough, so then other textures are mixed in that will give the illusion of a much more detailed ground.

 

 

 

"That means that a 4k texture would have one pixel for every 10m" ? maybe, but this is not "at the same scale, in the same simulated environment, the same amount of pixels fitted in an equivalent surface" as in the example of the 4k P-47 skin. Anyway, you already answered to that point too, as, indeed, if I got it correctly, it's all about distances and the moment when the simulator makes the required level of textures resolution "pops" into the simulation in front of the user's eyes (whatever the view terminal is, if monitor or VR headset). Correct?

 

 

[IckyATLAS]

1 hour ago, 343KKT_Kintaro said:

Going back to this P-47 skin which is in 4096x4096px: if we want the terrain or the scenery are in 4k too... do we need the same amount of pixels we have in the P-47's skin? (I mean at the same scale, in the same simulated environment, the same amount of pixels fitted in an equivalent surface).

Here it is a little bit different. The map is a kind of elevation surface of a certain dimension. Say you have a map 400km x 400km. That is already a pretty big map but with fast airplanes we need space. In a Po2 150 km/hr 2 and half hour to fly 400 km the map is immense, in a ME 262 at 800 km/hr its 30 minutes and it is a pretty small map. To put things in perspective, London to Berlin in straight line is about 950 km and London to Paris is 350 km. 

All this said there is indeed a resolution/precision for a map. This is the distance between two elevation points. The map is not flat so to show the terrain elevation from the flat base will allow you to create hills etc. If you want a resolution of 1 meter then your map will be a mesh containing 400'000 x 400'000 points or 160 billion points. One meter resolution when you walk is really not so nice, but flying at 400 km/hr at 6'000 meters it is another story, but eventually you land and takeoff, txi on an airfield, eject from your plane and land somewhere etc. But in your map there will be areas where you want to have more detail and others not. Lat's say you have a very flat and large region 2'000mt x 2'000mt that has basically no elevation and it is grassland and cultures then, you can have just a simple polygon with a few points instead of 4 million points and create a visual illusion of various fields using a texture that you apply like a carpet on that surface. The resolution of that texture is again different as the one of the mesh of the map structure. And then you have the objects you put on the map like Trees, Grass etc. and these will all have their own texture which can be of different resolution. All these different textures and you can have hundreds in a game and if they are very detailed they will take a lot of space in memory, and indeed many games today are huge in terms of size because of the textures. I will not go more in detail but I hope this gives you an idea that the screen resolution and the game graphic visual elements resolution are two different things. 

 

And if we would like to see the rivets of a plane with good realistic quality you can consider that your skin texture should have a resolution of 1mm considering the rivet with a diameter of 10mm. If the plane has a wing surface top of 25 square meters this means that you need a texture size with 25 million points. Then you have the bottom surface another 25 million points. Then you have the fuselage lateral surfaces right and left, the rudder and elevator surface plus wheels etc. Probably around 150-200 million points.

This would translate in a square texture of at minimum 12'000x12'000 pixels or 12K texture. You need an Nvidia 8090Ti to manage that and in five years and you'll have it ? 

 

 

[343KKT_Kintaro]

10 minutes ago, IckyATLAS said:

the screen resolution and the game graphic visual elements resolution are two different things.

 

 

Sir, yes, sir!

 

Things are clearer now.

 

 

10 minutes ago, IckyATLAS said:

You need an Nvidia 8090Ti to manage that and in five years and you'll have it

 

 

 

2027: confirmed. I'd better start saving my gold bars. From now. ?

 

[taffy2jeffmorgan]

That opened a rather impressive large can of worms, I salute all your knowledge on the subject, it made very interesting reading.

[PaladinX]

In 2001, when the original IL2 Sturmovik was published, the most  powerful graphics card was the Geforce 3 with 64 MB VRAM...so you can imagine why the resolutions were smaller that time.