It seems that these days it is fashionable to talk about frames per second, high resolution textures and limitations imposed by consoles. Chris Roberts, an outspoken defender of PC gaming, also wants his voice to be heard in this regard, and claims that Star Citizen will support 4K or even 8K textures when the time comes.
The bet of unparalleled graphic quality that Chris Roberts is making with Star Citizen is becoming more and more firm. In an interview with Tweak Town after the Australian PAX, Chris states that “big publishers shouldn’t ignore PC gamers, they are a more powerful group than you might think”. Chris is of the opinion that “they are doing it wrong by not supporting the PC”, and is “really angry when he sees an artificially limited game on the PC, simply because they don’t want it to look better than the Xbox One or PS4 version”. As for the 30 fps debate that Ubisoft and others have brought to the fore, Roberts is very clear, Star Citizen “has to look as detailed as possible, with the highest resolution and the highest frame rate”.
It seems that textures are the element that consumes the most memory in Star Citizen, and he comments on curious details such as the rivets and the lines of the panels are not textures but are modeled, thus freeing up memory for textures. Considering that there will be ships of 1 km in length, if everything were done in a traditional way the memory would be filled immediately. Using geometry is much more efficient, and increasing up to 4K or 8K will be perfectly possible. But the challenge is enormous if we put virtual reality in the middle, since to all this we will have to add the burden of generating two images of the game at 90 Hz or more. If the game will have levels of detail that will test the most powerful equipment on a monitor, they will have to work real magic (or set serious limitations) in the virtual reality mode of Star Citizen. But as of today, we will settle for them to support the DK2 as soon as possible.
