In a video game, you can walk up close enough to a wall that only 5% of the texture fills your entire screen. That means the texture is very zoomed in and you can clearly see the lack of detail in even a 4k texture, even when on a 1080p monitor.
You’re also not “pushing 4x the pixels through the game” the only possible performance downside is the vram usage (and probably slightly less efficient sampling)
If that is happening, the game designer is either incompetent and doesn’t know how to scale/asymetrically tile/uvmap/mipmap/use emergent detail maps/etc their textures and models properly, or coordinate level design with objects properly for such obects being viewed extremely up close or with extreme zoom… or they just don’t care to, either out of laziness, time constraints, targeted hardware limiting performance constraints, fundamental engine capability constraints, or intentional art style direction.
If your game is commonly causing situations where a 1080p texture is being viewed so closely that it is just showing you a stretched out, low res mess… you most likely aren’t scaling mipmaps adequately for your level design and object placement.
These video explain some of these concepts within UE:
And here’s an overview of how to asymetrically (not a simple repeating grid) tile large scale textures, to achieve a better looking large in game object with clever, repeated use of a single, smaller base texture, or overlayed noise maps, secondary textures, bump/normal/shadow maps, etc, within Blender.
And absolutely yes, if all the textures in a complex scene being rendered are 4K instead of 1080p, yes, every texture has 4x as many pixels, uses 4x as much vram, 4x as much system ram, is 4x more expensive to push into the entire render pipeline, etc, which will significantly lessen performance on most systems in most common situations.
I think the only actual performance downsides once everything is already loaded into vram should be from the sampled values being less often concurrent in memory (which shouldn’t matter at all if mipmaps are being used)
In a video game, you can walk up close enough to a wall that only 5% of the texture fills your entire screen. That means the texture is very zoomed in and you can clearly see the lack of detail in even a 4k texture, even when on a 1080p monitor.
You’re also not “pushing 4x the pixels through the game” the only possible performance downside is the vram usage (and probably slightly less efficient sampling)
If that is happening, the game designer is either incompetent and doesn’t know how to scale/asymetrically tile/uvmap/mipmap/use emergent detail maps/etc their textures and models properly, or coordinate level design with objects properly for such obects being viewed extremely up close or with extreme zoom… or they just don’t care to, either out of laziness, time constraints, targeted hardware limiting performance constraints, fundamental engine capability constraints, or intentional art style direction.
If your game is commonly causing situations where a 1080p texture is being viewed so closely that it is just showing you a stretched out, low res mess… you most likely aren’t scaling mipmaps adequately for your level design and object placement.
These video explain some of these concepts within UE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhDatVm6C6U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pcm6SrfgnvA
And here’s an overview of how to asymetrically (not a simple repeating grid) tile large scale textures, to achieve a better looking large in game object with clever, repeated use of a single, smaller base texture, or overlayed noise maps, secondary textures, bump/normal/shadow maps, etc, within Blender.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0Mc8fjSAA0
And absolutely yes, if all the textures in a complex scene being rendered are 4K instead of 1080p, yes, every texture has 4x as many pixels, uses 4x as much vram, 4x as much system ram, is 4x more expensive to push into the entire render pipeline, etc, which will significantly lessen performance on most systems in most common situations.
I think the only actual performance downsides once everything is already loaded into vram should be from the sampled values being less often concurrent in memory (which shouldn’t matter at all if mipmaps are being used)
What other step could decrease performance?