1K and 2K textures. Is it necessary nowadays?

[Art Blos]

Greetings to the Celestia community.

At the moment I am conducting full-scale work with textures in the "Celestia Origin". I created two additional folders with resolution 1K (1024×512) and 2K (2048×1024). My idea is that if the resolution 4K (4096×2048) is not displayed, the user will be able to replace this with smaller versions.

But I began to much doubt: how often now can meet such weak systems in which resolution 4K will not work even after installing the video drivers? Can these two folders be useful in practice? Therefore, I want to consult with all of you.

[SpaceFanatic64]

I say yes. While most systems nowadays are more advanced, not all people have access to those systems. Some people still use less advanced computers because they cannot afford more powerful computers, so just so those users can use Celestia Origin, you should keep the lower resolution textures.

[Art Blos]

Some people still use less advanced computers because they cannot afford more powerful computers

The situation is painfully familiar to me because my computer was released in 2005. I have a graphics card NVIDIA GeForce 6200 with 128 Mb video memory. BUT even that’s enough for to use 64K VT. Mono textures - maximum 8K, on models - 4K.

I say that the concept "weak computer" is very loose.

[fyr02]

2K should be kept. 1K is really up to you.

[Art Blos]

Me need as many opinions as possible. Feel free to justify your point of view. A simple voice will give me incomplete information.

[Janus]

Speaking as someone who works on many different setups, yes, definitely keep the 1K/2K textures.
In fact, making a proper hierarchy based on texture resolution would be a good idea.

There are two main reasons for this.

The first is laptops/portables/tablets.
The number and type of shortcuts taken by manufacturers of these devices springs past horrifying to silly.

The second is any system, desktop or not, with shared main and video memory.
This slows things because the CPU contends with display engine and the rendering engine both.
In order to have a display, the display hardware has absolute access.
After that, the CPU and the rendering hardware must be balanced.
Give the CPU high priority and rendering suffers.
While giving the rendering hardware high priority slows the whole system.

Coordinating with the developers to arrange texture resolutions would be a good idea.
Instead of low/med/hi, see if 1K/2K/4K/8K/16K and so can be arranged.
Make the choice part of the selection menu, with a natural fallback of course.
This will allow easy performance testing of any system simply selecting the texture resolution desired.

At the moment the low/med/hi system is somewhat random in the actual resolutions even though the size of correct.
So if you select medium, you might have 2K, 4K & 8K resolutions mixed together giving inconsistent display quality and performance while the user has changed nothing.
Having someone new to Celestia see a planet that looks nearly real life, then a moon that is cartoon like makes it hard for them to take the program seriously.

Perhaps you could start with versions like 1K/2K/4K, then 2K/4K/8K, and so on.
With a master edition that contains them all.


Janus.

[jujuapapa]

Hi,

Here are my use for celestia :
1k : comets, asteroids, moons
2k : planets
4k : inhabited planets

[Anthony_B_Russo10]

1k and 2k textures are still useful especially on older or low end systems, like mine.

[Art Blos]

1k and 2k textures are still useful especially on older or low end systems, like mine.

Wow... DDS-textures work on these laptops?

[Anthony_B_Russo10]

The graphics are good enough to render the OpenGL Vertex program along with my D820.

...But not my Viao.

[Art Blos]

Anthony_B_Russo10 < Just to make you understand. Even 1K and 2K permissions will in most cases be in DDS. I will not delete the PNG format in those specific cases when converting to DDS will greatly degrade quality.

[Lafuente_Astronomy]

Laptops are not like PC's. Due to their focus on portability, they tend to not have better graphical processing. There are laptops made for gaming with very high-end graphics processors but they are very expensive, and as such, I cannot buy them. So, yes, keep lower resolutions just in case

[Sirius_Alpha]

The lower resolution maps seem to take up such little hard-drive space (especially in the 2010s) that I'm having a hard time justifying the trade-off of getting rid of them at the expense of people with lower-end computers.

[fyr02]

For moons, definitely keep 1K. The amount of textures that need to be rendered in that case justifies keeping 1K.
For single bodies/important bodies (Mercury, Venus, Earth-Moon, Pluto, Mars) lowest resolution can be 2K.
For textures that are low resolution to begin with (Uranus, Neptune) keep 1K. For Uranus even 1/2K is fine.

[Art Blos]

OK. I came to the conclusion that 1K and 2K might be useful to someone. It really takes less than 100 megabytes of hard disk space, so it won’t hurt anyone.

Thank you all for your opinions.