Currently playing Sekiro and that's a goddamn pretty game! I compare it to this game and, well, seems like devs were definitely struggling with schedule and management because whomever works on the game industry isn't incompetent nor lazy given the amount of talent and dedication it needs to even get in.
Current game engines handle texture resolution and quality automatically, that's why you just put in the best version of your texture and it scales it down, devs don't have to create new sets of textures because of memory limitations, wtf are you talking about? And I fail to remember but don't you know a lot about these stuff? I'll assume you're just trolling. Hell, even if your engine is not capable of some basic automation like that, you can always resize in batches using photoshop... or even manually, you never have to create "another set of textures", not even Switch ports require that...
im not trolling, no. "automatic" handling usually means game will load super low res n64 like textures once the budget is exceeded
for the photoshop resizing thing, that's the problem. they would have to pack them as seperate textures in the game install or make it an option. that kind of move would breath life into low VRAM GPUs and cause them to be relevant for the end of the generation. they'd never want to do that. they never did that for 2 gig gtx 770 cards. how else would NV force people to buy their newer cards? logically you would think they'd NOW have to do that for Series S. but clearly WO LONG devs do not care.
forza 5 and halo infintie has special subset of textures that look allright on lower VRAM buffers, and you can guess why.
it is doable, but not every dev would like to do it. worse is, NV would actively discourage most devs from doing this.
being only 1-1.5 gb shy of required 3-3.5 gb vram for ultra textures in rdr2 meant that you're forced to play with these textures;
reducing textures "one notch" makes them so horrible to a point they look worse than ps4 in ac valhalla;
and this much "destruction" of textures only yields a meager 800 mb of vram saved. clearly the game does not have a special subset of textures for its texture setting. its a blatant compression made automatically by their engines.
spiderman is even worse. "one notch" below "very high" textures to "high" textures make the textures look like DOGWATER compared to freaking PS4.
im simply recounting what kind of experience you had lastgen when you simply did not have enough VRAM. and what I see on Series S is pretty much what most people with limited VRAM buffer experienced. huge sacrifices on texture resolution just to save a couple hundred megs of vram here and there and at best 1-2 gigs.
some games do scale gracefully, as I said, like forza horizon 4/5 and a plague tale requiem. these games have special subset of textures that you can clearly see and notice. lower texture settings in this game looks worse than ultra textures but they still look respectably good enough.
but most other devs dont and wont bother doing this as you can see from this example. most engines use blatant downscaling that cripples the actual texture or most engines simply reduce the streaming pool size which ends up loading n64 textures like Forspoken.
Series S is practically a console that clashes with the ideals of Huang Jensen. The reason jensen pushed 8 gb on so much midrange cards is because eventually they'd have to play with dogshit textures. Now Series S is a serious threat at this plan, I'm sure devs are also conflicted on what to do.
he pushed 2 gb 770s and 2 gb 960s in an era where ps4 and xbox one boasted 8 gb total memory (5.5 gb usable for gpu operations. maybe 3.5-4 gb of it used for gpu operations)
he knew that once games start to fully utilize that 5.5 gb memory buffer, 2 gig cards would go obsolete and push people to buy shiny new Pascals and Maxwells. his plan worked. people mass abandoned their Kepler 770s and 780s due to having to play with dogshit textures all of a sudden,
despite arkham knight and rise of tomb raider proved that good looking textures were indeed possible on 2 GB buffer. most devs never looked back and moved on. from that point on, you had to have a minimum of 3.5 gb vram to match consoles in terms of texture clarity, or you would have to adhere to dogshit textures in MAJORITY of the games.
now imagine if a 4 GB console existed in 2014. that console would a) force devs to create special subset of textures for a lower amount of budget that looks respectably good which would inevitably breath life to the all 2 GB GPU owners
and that would simply clash with the idea of planned obsolence.
I hope you get my point. I like Series S as an idea, but these devs and NVIDIA do not. I'm not saying its not doable. look at wo long. it literally loads n64 like textures. rdr2 looks better than while working with a lower budget. its a blatant in engine compression. if they actually do care for Series S userbase, they should create subset of textures.
