Texture Resolution

[Mundus33]

Sorry if this is the wrong subforum for this question but I was wondering how does texture resolution work I have searched around a bit but haven't gotten much information.

What I mean by how does it work is for example if I download and use a 4000x4000 resolution pack would I even be able to see it on a 1920x1200 monitor since technically it would be higher res than is capable of being displayed by the monitor and would a lower res texture like 720p look worse on a hd monitor rather than a 720p monitor similar to how lower resolutions look worse on an hd monitor. I know that the texture resolution isn't necessarily tied to monitor resolution but pixels are pixels when you get down to it.

Thanks for your help in advance for some reason this popped into my head today and now my curiosity has gotten the better of me

 

[mathew7]

The texture resolution affects how much detail an object surface can have. Think about an object which gets 200x200 pixels on the screen. The object can have 4kx4k texture, but it's overkill. GPUs also store many lower-resolution versions of textures so that when the object is small (like my example), a lower-version is used (like 128x128 or 256xx256). but when the object gets "closer" (maybe 80% of the screen), a much larger texture is used. The idea is to get as close as possible to 1:1 screen vs texture pixels (at most 2x2 texture pixels/1 screen pixel). This is because of 2 reasons:
1. sampling a high-res texture is memory-ineficient (the smaller the objects, the more of them there are and more spread among sampling from memory)
2. the developers can prepare the low-res textures so they look better than a simple GPU/DX size reduction
1st point affects frame rates very much.
2nd point may be skipped but overall image quality is affected.
So downloading a 4K res pack should be for good for 1st of all high resolutions (like 3x1080p) and 2nd high-performance boards (with much RAM and performance).
In current games, the developers probably release the game with right textures for 1080p, so high-res pack is mostly for those with exceptionally big screens.