I'd be very pleased if Bethesda did this. I want a high res pack Bethesda style!

Honestly, unless you spend alot of time staring at the textures from an in-game distance of a couple inches, 4096x4096 is probably overkill on any monitor.



------

Meanwhile, did you see the system requirements they put on that patch? 1024mb VRAM and DX11 required. If it's using DX11 crap, that suggests it's not merely "higher rez" textures.

Not really, there are plenty of cards out there with 1GB that are older and crappier cards (think lower than 8800GT). By doing that, they guarantee that someone has one of the newer and more powerful cards, hopefully they won't be complaining about frame rates as much then.

OK, so what would be the optimal texture resolution for a 1920x1080 display?

(I play at this resolution either on my laptop, or projected to a large space on my wall approximately 16 feet by 9 feet.)

Screen resolution don’t matter much 1920x1080 is full HD and about as good as you can get, you have a 1920x1200 format and the big 2500*1500 on dell and apple 30”.
Basically you want as much as you can get and how much your graphic card can manage, the later might be an issue on a laptop.

Well, nice detail & redeeming gesture from Bioware...I sincerely appreciate that.

Todd has already confirmed that the PC version will be packed with higher-res textures than the console version...let's hope it's true.

Valve did it for Half-Life too.

And, while it wasn't a patch, Sacred 2 had a set of "elite" textures. Upped the install size from ~15GB to ~25GB, I think. But they charged for it - the disc with the bigger texture set only came with the CE edition.

Wow, I'm surprised EA didn't slap a price tag on it.

Thanks for this feedback. I'm able to run the 4k textures in Oblivion, for example, without too much impact on frame rates, but I haven't tried anything else (only vanilla version or 4096x4096).

I suppose it's a subjective matter - would be interesting to try a 2048x2048 texture pack to see if it is noticeably worse. If not too bad, then I imagine it would be worth switching to get a boost in fps.

The PS3 should also get HiRes textures...blu-ray discs can contain a lot of memory.

Yeah, but the consoles have limited VRAM, normally (I'm not entirely certain how the PS3 manages this). Higher-rez textures dramatically increase the amount of video memory that a game uses.

That's not how it works, blu-ray gives it a lot of storage space, not a lot of memory. It's still limited to a paltry 512mb RAM and a weak GPU.

And this wasn't included with the Dragon Age 2 PC release because...?

1GB is a decent amount of space and it seems highly unlikely that whatever format it was released on (whether one or multiple DVDs) would have that much free space, would be my guess.

Another possibility that occurred to me is that the "hey, we can toss out a set of optional huge textures for the folks with 1024mb+ cards" was an off-hours/hobby project by a couple of the texture guys, that they only finished recently.


Or, there just wasn't time and it wasn't worth delaying the game release for.

As I've heard it, they hadn't finished the high-rez textures when the gamediscs went into pressing.

Bioware's attempt to pacify their PC audience with their offer of a hig- res texture pack is laughable. Consumers wanted a decent rpg experience, not some awful button-mashing gimped game. Bioware ceded their rpg crown to Bethesda many moons ago. They should leave the genre alone entirely now, and concentrate on churning out COD influenced Mass Effect spin-offs, it's all they're fit for.

These texture packs require a 1GB graphics card anyhow, so I'd have no use for them. I just hope Beth look at the diaster that is DA2, and say "yep, we ain't going down that route' and cede the souless 'mainstream' centre-ground to EA-oware.

I remember when Obsidian released HD versions of all the cutscenes for Kotor2; You just swap them and the game played the scenes in hi-res.

....ooookay. Right.


Don't know anything about DA2 (I played 1, and wasn't motivated to do a second play or get the sequal, because the combat was so frackin' hard and tedious), but ME1 and ME2 were really good RPGs, I thought. With really strong storytelling. (1 a bit more than 2) Combat isn't what makes an RPG.