Star Citizen will have 8K textures, no 'baked down' graphics

PAX AU 2014 - After the 'A Chat With Chris Roberts - The Original Wing Commander' at PAX AU, we interviewed the man himself, hitting him up with some questions about Star Citizen.

Roberts said that the big publishers "shouldn't have been ignoring the PC gamers, they're a much more powerful group than you think". He continued, saying that "publishers have been dropping the ball on supporting the PC", and that it "pisses me off when I see a deliberately gimped game on PC, just because we can't make it look better than the Xbox One or PS4 version". When I asked Chris about the 30FPS stories we've been hearing from Ubisoft and others lately, he had much better things to say about Star Citizen. Chris said that he "wants it all", where he wants to see Star Citizen "look as detailed as possible, in the highest resolution, at the highest frame rate" possible.

We asked about the insane level of detail that Star Citizen will feature, where he said that we should expect up to 8K textures, and beyond. Chris said that they're not building a game that is "baked down" as the biggest bottleneck right now is texture memory. The biggest memory hog of Star Citizen right now, are "the textures" according to Roberts. He said that "rivets, panel lines" and more are not in the textures, they're all modelled, freeing up precious texture memory. It needs to be done this way, because there are massive 1km long ships in the game, and if everything was done the traditional way, texture memory would run out very quickly.

When gaming at 4K, looking up close looks much better to the gamer, instead of textures being spread out and losing quality. Roberts said that texture isn't cheap, with the game having 4K and 8K textures being thrown online to your PC, being a very large bottleneck. Doing it in geometry is "much cheaper", decal textures and tiled textures being used by the team at RSI. Going to "4K or 8K, it'll still hold up, it won't break down".