Upcoming Crysis High Resolution Texture Pack Preview

Any time the video must use or access system RAM there will be a performance penalty.

Quake4 had an umcompressed textures (Ultra high) setting... this created ~500mb of texture data! It took a 512mb GPU and a high-end one to render good framerates with this setting, it did impact performnace compared to the standard "high" setting.

Since Crysis already runs so poor, I'm not sure how much of an impact this would have though... you already need a powerful 512mb+ GPU to run it, lots of GPUs above 512mb now. Might not make a huge difference? Will be interesting to see.

memory size is not all that matters, texture pushing power is; otherwise you can add more memory to any old graphics card to allow high res textures? This simply isn't true. there are enough of low&mid-range products with 1gb on the market which don't perform better then their 512Mb siblings no matter what how high you push the texture quality. The GPU has to have to power the handle the extra data flow.

So you can be certain that a high-res texture pack for Crysis will get a nice performance hit, even on the highest end cards with 1Gb+ onboard memory.

The planet with 2 GB memory (on XP) and 512MB VRAM?


It is the same case as with Doom 3. Ultra High textures weren't supposed to fit on the cards at that time, but because the cards could access the system memory it worked flawless.


Texture size is not an issue today, it is the cheapest way to make games look good with minimal performance impact.

high resolution textures are freebies? what planet do you come from?

I bet there won't be a noticeable impact on performance. Textures usually area freebie.