Kind of divering from the larger point, but that’s true — RAM prices haven’t gone up as much as other things have over the years. I do kind of wonder if there are things that game engines could do to take advantage of more memory.
I think that some of this is making games that will run on both consoles and PCs, where consoles have a pretty hard cap on how much memory they can have, so any work that gets put into improving high-memory stuff is something that console players won’t see.
checks Wikipedia
The XBox Series X has 16GB of unified memory.
The Playstation 5 Pro has 16GB of unified memory and 2GB of system memory.
You can get a desktop with 256GB of memory today, about 14 times that.
Would have to be something that doesn’t require a lot of extra dev time or testing. Can’t do more geometry, I think, because that’d need memory on the GPU.
considers
Maybe something where the game can dynamically render something expensive at high resolution, and then move it into video memory.
Like, Fallout 76 uses, IIRC, statically-rendered billboards of the 3D world for distant terrain features, like, stuff in neighboring and further off cells. You’re gonna have a fixed-size set of those loaded into VRAM at any one time. But you could cut the size of a given area that uses one set of billboards, and keep them preloaded in system memory.
Or…I don’t know if game systems can generate simpler-geometry level-of-detail (LOD) objects in the distance or if human modelers still have to do that by hand. But if they can do it procedurally, increasing the number of LOD levels should just increase storage space, and keeping more preloaded in RAM just require more RAM. You only have one level in VRAM at a time, so it doesn’t increase demand for VRAM. That’d provide for smoother transitions as distant objects come closer.
OP didn’t expand on it, and his photos didn’t show it, but this mouse apparently has a bunch of thumb buttons, which is a legitimately-rare feature (though it’s not the only mouse out there to have a bunch).
EDIT: Amazon has 786 “gaming mice” with 10 or more — a bit arbitrarily-chosen on my part — buttons, so I guess that there’s a reasonable crop out there.
Looking at their dev guidelines page, they don’t have any texture resolution limit other than “don’t use very large textures on very small objects”, so I doubt that the project has any really hard caps.
Do not use large textures for small objects—this wastes video RAM.
If they are concerned about distribution size, if the game supports it or could support it, might be possible to have a separate high-resolution-texture package, package those separately.
I doubt it, seeing as it looks like it’s still being actively developed. I’d expect anyone who wanted to have higher resolution textures or whatever to just add an option for that to the main game.
EDIT: It does look like they have abut 500 “addon” tracks, and I suppose that some of those might have higher-resolution textures than the tracks in the base game.
EDIT2: Also, it’s not SuperTuxKart, but you’re looking for more-realistic open source racing graphics and haven’t seen it, there’s TORCS. That might do what you want.
EDIT4: It doesn’t look like you can sort the add-on tracks on the website by size, but you can sort by upload date, and I’d assume that newer tracks are probably more likely to have higher-resolution textures.
“Back in the day, we used to put in painstaking work and made many futile efforts to avoid texture warping, only for it to be called ‘charming’ nowadays.”
I like the look of Carrier Command 2, and that doesn’t even have much by way of textures; it uses mostly untextured polygons, with some low-resolution nearest-neighbor-scaled textures for things like displays.
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