Wow 6gb is alot. I wonder why they do the extra work for Ultra Textures just for 0.1% of the PC gamer.
Is Maxwell not 20-30% more effective with their VRAM because of this new color compression or was it only for the memeory bandwith? And MFAA does save VRAM compared to MSAA too.
Actually what they did is not more work, is less work.
Basically for every developer is a good straight forward way to work create texture without limitations and to scale down after that.
A good way to known what is the best size for a texture is to analyze how many texels of the texture will be visible in screen. But is a good way, not the best way. Best way is to join that info with how many seconds those texels will be visible in a complete run of the game. That info could be possible using automatic tools but I can't find a developer that take it account.
I can say a few examples using watch dogs. That game uses big textures for ad panels that are a few meters over the streets. You can't reach that panels so in a normal gameplay you are not seeing half the texels of that texture for a 1080p screen resolution. But, the game uses the same resolution for grass textures that are a used everywhere, you look at they frequently and on top of that grass textures are expanded for big zones of terrain so the ratio texels/ratio is horrible. Same for roads. A road texture used for 20 meters of terrain has same resolution than a newspaper decal used over the street on a corner.
Why that happens?
Doing a good balance between work in sizing textures is a lot of work. And moreso you need the memory requeriments before hand to start the calculation. That have to work over the premises I said before. A ordered list starting with most visible texture to the less visible taking accound how many texels will be necessary for them using a fixed screen resolution.
As difficult that task is, is easiest for a closed platform. Watch Dogs in PS4 use a clever mix of ultra/high/medium textures (not perfect mix btw). In pc they take the fast path: We have 1Kx1K textures for enviroment and 4Kx4K textures for characters. So ultra texture quality will be every texture in max resolution, high will be every texture at half and normal one quarter. So the fucking dirt leaves over the streets will be a blurry mess and we don't care the player will be looking that texture half of the game.
So, if the mordor game has a few 4K textures for important assets in console versions, I guess ultra quality for pc means every fucking texture is maxed, they don't care is most of them are not really necessary.
