4K weapons and armor textures are practically useless - Reddit post
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About this image
A collection of screenshots demonstrating that 4K resolution for weapons and armor is practically useless for normal play, and doesn't justify the space it takes up at all.
I'm not saying 4K textures for weapons and armor are completely useless. After all, there's clearly some screenshots where you are seeing the 4K texture. But the amount of times you see the full 4K texture is so few, you are far better off just using 2K for general play, as that is the dominant size seen due to mipmapping.
Screenshot Link
The screenshot were taken on a 1440p monitor. There was no difference in which mipmapping level was used from 1080p to 4K. It was mostly 2K and 1K. The only difference was 720p where the mipmapping dropped down to more 1K and 512 stuff.
Mipmap explanation so people understand what's going on here.
Mipmap's are reduced sizes of the texture embedded in the .dds file. The game is not going to render 4K textures at 4K all the time, that would require too much processing. When you get further away from an object, the mipmapping kicks in and shows one of the reduced sizes of the texture. In the screenshots everything has 4K textures, the different numbers are the smaller mipmaps displaying instead of the full 4K size. Mipmap's are always a division by the power of 2, e.g. 4K, 2K, 1K, 512.
This obviously doesn't apply to screen archers.
Credits to kirara386 for the Texture Size Helper mod, I made a few adjustments to the texture to see the mipmap sizes that were displaying a bit easier.
20 comments
Also, I presume 4K for armor only really makes sense for a full-body cuirass, or if the entire set happens to share a UV, right? For non-modding stuff, I work in Unreal Engine where it's easy to lose track of many materials, so it's beneficial to have several objects share a UV and material. I'd love to know if this might be of any benefit in Skyrim regarding optimization (disk space, VRAM usage and draw calls).
Lots of strong opinions about texture sizes, from people who don’t know that “4K” doesn’t refer to their monitor.
Totally agree, and thanks for putting these screenshots together, very interesting to see.
ENB (Full Quality versions so i can benefit from all effects)
1080p Display Resolution because it works well and will be viable for performance for a long time still even with upcoming open world games.
(If 1080p looks too stretched then thats a monitor size issue because above 24inch 1440p is recommended to look good especially widescreen)
Mountain Textures 4K (Glaciers included)
Trees are a different story as they contain multiple parts so i just use the default.
Plants and Grass nothing above 2K.
Architecture and Landscape textures 2K because 1K wont look good enough but i cant notice any difference with 4K
Weapons Armor 2K mainly.
Furniture and smaller objects like clutter 1K. There's a handfull of small stuff i stick with 1K instead.
Character NPC textures mostly 2K but that also depends on the part for example 4K Beards or Warpaint would be totally useless.
LOD i use the recommended HD settings from Stepmodifications.
So the only 8K stuff are Dragons and the only 4K textures are Mountains and Glaciers.
Now depending on the Sky Texture maybe 8K could be usefull but it depends on how the texture is designed. I cant tell for sure i use NAT default skies with individual mods for Moons and Stars.
Its just Mountain Textures that will look kinda blurry if not 4K and the same applies to most Architecture and Landscape if not 2K.
Checking my modlist size (Around 360 Plugins and over 700 individual files downloaded) its 76.4GB. Textures when combined reach around 30GB.
or items things that I zoom into alot, like first person swords that I like to stare at.
4k and sometimes even 8k for very big textures (like Statues, Mountains etc. and maybe some landscapes) 2k for most daily stuff and even lower for small things like flowers, clutter etc.
In my experience, most of the people using (or claiming to use) only 4K plus are just trying to wave their…erm…. “attributes”… around.
This is why I don't use reddit lmao
Of course when it comes it armors/weapons, which is the subject matter here, it gets simpler as the longer range doesn't really count as a problem with such small objects, but texture baking can be problematic depending mostly of the object/s that are being textured. Admittedly I'm not well versed on armor/weapon mods (though I do use all of yours) so I'm not gonna disagree with you on that regard, but calling 8-16k in general as a circlejerk and not an actually useful option for creating interesting, non-repeating and hi-def terrain objects is just silly and to me peak-reddit.