1440p vs 1080p - Texture Quality & Compression

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philstat

Limp Gawd
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Jan 31, 2012
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I was using an Auria 27 (EQ276W) and a Dell U2711 for a variety of games, Skyrim, L4D2, Fallout 3 & Vegas, GTA-IV, Saints Row the Third, Ghost Recon FS and a number of other games and I can say without a doubt the graphics (textures) are clearer and better on my other two displays - HP LP2475w and a ASUS VE258Q, not even close. I'm using a GTX 670, I believe this is attributed to this current generation of console games are all made with limited technology in mind (360 and PS3) both of which are very limited when it comes to texture sizes. IMO, games are literally stretching textures to fit the intended RES, the graphic artists when making the games are not truly creating separate large scale 1024 or 2048 sized textures, most are in the 512 range. Why would they when the overwhelming majority of games are created for the consoles where 90+% are 720p or lower with upscaling. Has anyone else noticed this? it's definitely something that I find highly noticeable in just about every game I've tried. I actually got rid of my Auria and Dell because of this - didn't want to scale a more blurred image just to have more pixels, I wanted the absolute best image quality and IMO 1080p and 1200p trump the 1440 and 1600p screens due to very FEW games will actually take advantage of their resolutions.
 
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You really think dropping down in resolution results in better image quality? That sounds like all of the flawed anti-HDTV arguments where people insisted they'd rather not see the flaws in actors' faces

You're going about this all wrong. You know that sitting further away from the 27" monitor for gaming is going to be equivalent, as far as your eyes are concerned, to sitting close to a 24" monitor?

Look into high-res texture packs for the games you play.
 
I see what you are saying, I do, I just feel most games are topped out for the most part with textures that don't exceed the typical HD resolutions. Why would game developers that are predominantly programming for the consoles make textures exceeding say 2048 in size, I don't think most are even 1024 let alone double. They don't have the necessary video memory on the legacy video cards that the consoles use - why would the graphic artists make overly large complex textures when the consoles can't employ them due to being based off of legacy graphics cards and are going to display them in a 720p resolution anyways. There are a few games that actually have exceptionally high res textures such as the Witcher 2 and others, though IMO they are greatly the minority. Most everything is compressed and less detailed to fit and work on the consoles.
 
when the artist draws a texture, the higher the resolution its rendered at, and the higher the pixel density of your display, will always make a noticeable improvement.
yes the better the source texture the better the on screen texture will look but resolution and more so pixel density will always matter too.
Anti-aliasing makes textures blurry, if your pixel density is high enough you won't have to worry about AA so much and get a crisper image.

here is a 6 year old game, rendered at a 12 year old consoles native resolution

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and here it is rendered on a modern pc at 4 times native resolution

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same exact textures, just rendered properly
your right the pc games can always use higher res textures, but it does a great job with what it has to work with.

i wish we had monitors that were WAY higher then 1440p

your 24" monitors have like 90ish ppi and the 27" monitors have 110ish ppi, so i'm shocked to hear your say you like the 24's better
 
Well he did say it's a 6yr old game. :)

What I think philstat is saying (correct me if I'm wrong) is that console games (native res 720p - very few at 1080p) looks much better on a 25" monitor 1080p monitor than on a 27" 1440p monitor. Well, I would probably say "DUH!" to that. Scaling a 720p game to a higher res will always look crappy just like scaling a 480p TV show onto a 1080p screen.

And I'm not sure where you get your info about "very few games will take advantage of their (higher) resolutions"... There are plenty of games that can run in high res. Borderlands (2009) looks way better on a 27" 1440p screen than on a 27" 1080p- I know cuz I've played it plenty on both. And I'd bet against the 25" 1080p screen as well.

Another thought just occurred to me.. maybe philstat is playing his xbox or ps3 on these monitors? If so, then yeah.. you should stick to a 1080p monitor or even a 720p monitor. These high res monitors are meant for PC users.
 
I do have my PS3 and 360 hooked up to my two PC monitors via HDMI so yeah a 1080p monitor would look better than a 1440p, due to less scaling.

My main point was - most PC games cannot render textures that are truly being taken advantage of by these ultra high res monitors - because the overwhelming majority of games today are made for the consoles (first and foremost), most producers will make higher res textures for the PC version, though not enough to quantify the purchase of a 1440p monitor. I didn't see a difference on any game other than a handful, for the most part I thought they looked more blurred. What I was saying before was unless it's first rate game that was made specifically for the PC and not the consoles, yeah, it could have ultra high quality textures that would indeed look better on a 1440p, though they would be the exception, not the norm.

Most developers are making medium textures at best because they have to fit them to the outdated consoles which have very limited video and system RAM.
 
Perfect Dark Zero has more high resolution textures than BF3. Timesfhit (2007) also has more high resolution textures than most modern games, but it also looks quiet cartoony.

http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/422/perfectdscr.jpg

This is from BF3 on ultra @1080p

3545031baf73130f.jpg


Games that try and look realistic typically have garbage textures. Uncharted & Gears of War 1 both have far more high resolution textures than their threequels as well as most new games, the difference is that the #3's are trying to look realistic while the first games are quite cartoony.
 
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Wow NCX...I had forgotten how GOOD Perfect Dark: Zero looked...and a 360 launch title at that!
 
Unfortunately, higher rez 2560x ips in my experience results in textures being smeared out more during FoV movement so it depends how you look at it regarding clearer textures than a 120hz + high rtc and very low response time TN at 1080P ( or vs an essentially blur-free fw900 at 1920*1200). Motion vs static is quite different to your eye.
 
Thanks NCX but that isn't really on the topic though.. some games have higher/better textures than others, true but that would still apply whether you're at 1440p or 720p. The topic is about whether recent games by default have less textures because they're built for consoles and this would translate to a lower quality picture on high res monitors.

And just to touch on this side topic for a sec.. If you're comparing textures from a 2007 game vs a 2011 game, then I'd have to ask what else is the 2011 game bringing to the table that the 2007 can't? And I'd answer that question with better dynamic shadowing, higher particle physics, ambient occulusion, etc.. all the things that make the game "feel" more realisting. And because of that, the developers probably focused more on the things you would be looking at and overall realism of the game (in BF3) while playing the game vs the number of textures on a wall that you would be passing by to get to your next objective.
 
ZeroH said:
And just to touch on this side topic for a sec.. If you're comparing textures from a 2007 game vs a 2011 game, then I'd have to ask what else is the 2011 game bringing to the table that the 2007 can't? And I'd answer that question with better dynamic shadowing, higher particle physics, ambient occulusion, etc.. all the things that make the game "feel" more realisting. And because of that, the developers probably focused more on the things you would be looking at and overall realism of the game (in BF3) while playing the game vs the number of textures on a wall that you would be passing by to get to your next objective.
Click to expand...

It makes sense, if you think about it, that developers would use higher res. textures early in the lifetime of a console. It's an easy way to make games look better. You see it all the time in remakes and mods, just replace everything with higher res textures and everything looks better.

But later on they would find more complicated ways to improve graphics, and since the hardware isn't changing something else would have to be sacrificed.

What really bugs me though, is that pretty much every developer must be working with high res textures that get downsampled for the final product. It would be nice if more games were released on PC with high res texture packs, like Sleeping Dogs, or Crysis 2. I'm sure it would take some effort, but it's such a simple way of making games look better.
 
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