Performance with HD textures

[Mango]

Hi there.

As a guy who doesn't have a good graphics card and knows basicly nothing about programing, I'd like to ask a question.

Im pretty sure, my computer won't be able to handle new graphics, so I was thinking... Is it possible to programme the game so it changes it's texture quality depending on how zoomed you currently are?
Lets say im totally zoomed out, so I don't need high graphics 'cause I won't recognise it anyway. But as i zoom in I can see the difference.

So the idea is to basicly be able to see better grafics when zoomed in, but let the game change to old textures when zoomed out.

As I said, I have no idea if it's possible or if im totally out... just thinking.

[Mooncat]

There is such technique in computer graphics, called Mipmap.

A drawback is that it will increase memory usage, because textures of all resolutions have to be loaded into memory, or otherwise, switching between resolutions during runtime will cause lag as the process takes time.

Don't know what the devs think about it. But if it is implemented, there should be an option to turn it off, or people will complain about having insufficient memory.
In my mod testing environment, I have to set graphics quality to very low or the driver will crash, because there are too many images from too many mods. lol

[Loewchen]

The biggest limitation of the HD textures will be VRAM, the functionality you are proposing would make this issue even bigger as you would have to store the low resolution variants as well. Furthermore the minimum VRAM for the HD textures is 4GB, if your card has that, then it should be performant enough anyway.

[keyboardhack]

Furthermore the minimum VRAM for the HD textures is 4GB.

This is ofcourse with all texture being high res which 0.15 won't have. For 0.15 you are probably good if you have atleast 2GB.
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... s/dgkgl5x/

[Vectura]

hang on, so if I don't have a highly expensive graphics card then I won't even be able to run the high resolution textures! I really, really hope that is not the case...

[Vectura]

So I will need a 4gb graphics card to run the final game with the high res textures? Welp, I REALLY hope the low res textures will remain an option then!

[joon]

Yeah for high res is 4Gb recommended. 2 Gb is for normal graphics and they will keep the normal/low resolution, I think.

- Added high graphics quality "option"

[xng]

So I will need a 4gb graphics card to run the final game with the high res textures? Welp, I REALLY hope the low res textures will remain an option then!

Don't worry you still have the normal resolution, and you also have a compressed texture setting for even less memory demand.

[Zeblote]

hang on, so if I don't have a highly expensive graphics card then I won't even be able to run the high resolution textures! I really, really hope that is not the case...

You don't need a "highly expensive" graphics card for 4GB memory. Even a crappy RX 460 will do that.

[Loewchen]

Yeah for high res is 4Gb recommended. 2 Gb is for normal graphics and they will keep the normal/low resolution, I think.

- Added high graphics quality "option"

The minimum requirements will stay at 512MB for the time afaik.

[AileTheAlien]

The biggest limitation of the HD textures will be VRAM, the functionality you are proposing would make this issue even bigger as you would have to store the low resolution variants as well.

It's worth pointing out, however, that the impact of storing the lower-resolution textures should be a small fraction of the high-res ones. i.e. If the low-res textures are 1/2 the spatial resolution (e.g. 200 dots per inch instead of 400 DPI, or whatever the case may be), then they would be 1/4th the amount of memory. Super-low-res textures that are 1/3 the resolution of the high-res ones would of course be 1/9th the memory required. That's just how 2D data works. :)

[Vectura]

Another question then. Will the 'normal' texture quality that you mentioned be the same as the low resolution textures we have now, or will it be a step above that?

[posila]

Is it possible to programme the game so it changes it's texture quality depending on how zoomed you currently are?

This is called texture streaming and is widely used in gaming to unload old and load new textures as you move through level or world. Factorio currently doesn't have this, but we will experiment with texture streaming in future. We kind of dug ourselves into a hole by adding zoom-to-world feature, which allows you to zoom on any part of a map almost instantly, which would cause noticeable pop-in.

The minimum requirements will stay at 512MB for the time afaik.

Normal resolution graphics takes up about 800 MB currently, but I am sure 512MB graphics card will be able to handle that with driver using shared memory for things that are not used very often. But we will have to test that somehow ... eventually.

hang on, so if I don't have a highly expensive graphics card then I won't even be able to run the high resolution textures! I really, really hope that is not the case...

Depends on what do you consider highly expensive graphics card, currently high-res seems to work fine on GTX 750 Ti with 2 GB VRAM.

Another question then. Will the 'normal' texture quality that you mentioned be the same as the low resolution textures we have now, or will it be a step above that?

0.14 level of quality of sprites is considered "normal"