But at 4k, even at 10 feet away, that model is now actually very sharp and in focus. A model such as a tin can, can switch to its next LOD at lets say 10 feet away when playing at 1080p. Again, like the fonts, the engine will determine how much screen space an object is taken up based on its XYZ bounds, and then suggest when it should switch to another LOD. Another method, is that you pick the LOD based on resolution. For example if the scene is struggling to maintain a target frame rate, then you can automatically drop the LOD level on certain objects until you reach that level.
One method, is to do it based on performance. You can also tweak it yourself, if you want to have more distance, for example. Our engine for example will implement LOD settings based on distance from the object, which is pretty standard. Every game has different ways of showing you which LODs to use. This is why some of the 360 games suddenly have high resolution art assets for GUI elements. HOWEVER, it does mean that the resolution matches that users game resolution, and fonts are neither over sharp or over blurry. Now sadly this doesn't mean what you may think it means, because sadly the game will still need to load all sheets into memory still. So if its a small scale, theres no reason to use large high resolution assets, and vice versa.
![witcher 3 pc vs xbox witcher 3 pc vs xbox](https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Witcher-3-48.jpg)
The engine would then decide based on the overall scale of the word used, which set to use. For example, if you have the word "FIGHT" onscreen, this would use a font cache of texture assets that range from very low resolution up to very high. The engine itself will chose the appropriate mip level for the texture tile based on A) the resolution and B) the overall ratio of screen space shared in combination with the resolution.
![witcher 3 pc vs xbox witcher 3 pc vs xbox](https://www.videogameschronicle.com/files/2020/09/EhEFcJtXYAAbkP8.jpg)
The way this works is that we create art that essentially has multiple mip levels. I can shed a little light on some things that are going on here with backwards compatibility titles.įirst of all, UI elements being higher resolution.