Maximum texture resolution?

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Cammera
Posts: 19
Joined: 08 Oct 2017, 22:35

Maximum texture resolution?

Post by Cammera »

(Sorry if I'm difficult to read right now, not feeling okay)

I'd like there to be a texture quality slider, maybe several to pick between actors, terrain, and meshes. Though I dunno how or if the renderer distinguishes those and meshes are used as part of the terrain, so that could be a bit of a mess to implement for several reasons :lol: . Say, pick texture qualities multiples of 64 (Maximum 512 px, then 1024, etc) with the ingame slider and one can set arbitrary sizes in settings.cfg

I realize this might seem moot considering if you want textures anywhere near modern resolutions you have to go out of your way to get them, but it'd be useful if you like textures but not their needlessly high resolutions (Either because you don't care, they're too high res and dno't fit with the rest, or your resolution is too low to benefit anyways) and don't want to spend the time manually downscaling them. People who wants to run morrowind in a Rpi and the like would also benefit from being capable to take the game to potato levels as of yet unseen. Not to mention old hardware in general.

And I'm not a coder, but yesterday when I was thinking about this I remembered dds files already have downscaled mipmaps, wouldn't that make for a smoother implementation of this? Check if the texture has a mipmap and then pick that instead of downscaling at texture load.
Sagacity
Posts: 31
Joined: 05 Mar 2019, 12:58

Re: Maximum texture resolution?

Post by Sagacity »

The issue with this is that texture resolution, alone, is not a good indicator of texture quality, especially when considering textures on larger objects. Further, there are issues with using a generic slider. Certainly forcing mip-maps would increase speed, but what do you do when there aren't any generated mip-maps. What do you do with 90% of your textures have been modified from 256x to 4096x? Do you keep the texture slider the same, or account for that? It'd be difficult to implement something like this without other complications. And it's just not really all that necessary with Morrowind. Maybe for something like Oblivion or Skyrim, or a modded playthrough, but those are all 1.0+ goals, and not really relevant yet. It would also likely be a better idea to determine this before the game even launches, since it sounds like you're asking for the engine to force lower-resolution textures.

Ultimately, the feature seems superfluous.
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AnyOldName3
Posts: 2667
Joined: 26 Nov 2015, 03:25

Re: Maximum texture resolution?

Post by AnyOldName3 »

It's not even certain that using lower mip levels will produce a measurable performance increase. Sampling textures is something GPUs do a lot, so GPU designers put a lot of work into making it fast.
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