Do 4K textures impact FPS?

[virtualflying 2]

Basically the title, and if so, by how much?

[RTK1972 288]

Good question. I have the feeling that on my rig there is no impact (6700 oc to 4.5 and 1080gtx)

[Chock 17,769]

Yes, they will do. Anything which has more information moving around the screen will by definition require more processing, so that could of course impact on how fast a computer can do that.

[joemiller 269]

Absolutely! Will be around 3-5 frames. 

[YukonPete 586]

Running 4k is equivalent to running a game on x4 1080 monitors. so of course its going to require more CPU & GPU power. That means lower frames.

[mawibo 33]

1 hour ago, YukonPete said:

Running 4k is equivalent to running a game on x4 1080 monitors. so of course its going to require more CPU & GPU power. That means lower frames.

Hi Pete,

4k textures and 4k monitors are 2 different things. 4k textures refer to the size of the texture files. Textures for aircraft and e.g. airport objects or clouds are combined into files of a certain pixel size. The larger these files, the more details can be shown when zooming in (independent  of monitor resolution). Higher resolution texture files take a bit longer to process and will use more VRAM on your GPU.

[Jim Young 2,356]

There are many discussions of 4K technology in the Graphics Card Hardware Forum too.

Best regards,

Jim

[Hoang 108]

Pretty good question. I wonder this myself because I have done several test on my system, 2048x2048 vs 4096x4096 texture seems very similar on performance...or I didn't test enough?

[WarpD 824]

The real question is... how many actual 4k textures are in the sim?  In other words, just because you select 4kx4k, doesn't mean the sim has all textures at that resolution.  Would be interesting to know the details.

[Chock 17,769]

31 minutes ago, WarpD said:

The real question is... how many actual 4k textures are in the sim?  In other words, just because you select 4kx4k, doesn't mean the sim has all textures at that resolution.  Would be interesting to know the details.

This is a good point, and one relevant to developers too if their development images were not originally taken at a suitably high resolution. Just because a texture gets ramped up to contain more pixels doesn't mean it will look any better if the info on those additional pixels wasn't there on the original image in the first place.

Expecting that is a bit like when you see those terrible CSI cop shows, where some detective hands a technician a CCTV picture which looks like it was taken from in orbit with a potato, and asks: 'Can you enhance that for me?' whereupon said technician quickly taps a few keys on their computer, the one which apparently has a magic version of Photoshop on it, and suddenly you can read a license plate number on the image.