I don't understand why this game has bad quality textures?

[Dragon]

I just started playing this game. So far I played for about 5 hours.

One thing that stuck out to me like a sore thumb was how bad the quality of many of the textures are, especially on things like cliffs, cavern walls, plants, trees, grass, and that sort of thing.

I literally was wondering if my GPU was malfunctioning, and/or if my game was bugged. I'm running it on 4K on a 1080 Ti and even if I crank up all the settings, these problems of low quality textures don't seem to improve much.

So before I made this thread, I did a google search and I see other people complaining about this issue long before I noticed it tonight, i.e:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/812140/discussions/0/1732090362062958889/

and

https://www.reddit.com/r/assassinscreed/comments/9k641i/suggestion_high_resolution_texture_pack_for/

Even Witcher 3 looks better for me, visually speaking, in some aspects, than Odyssey. Granted, I have some HD mods installed for Witcher 3, so maybe that's why, I don't know?

I'm still not 100% convinced that my GPU isn't defective based on how bad the Odyssey textures look to me.

Can any of you reassure me if the textures are actually that bad and thus it's not my GPU?

Supplementary question: why does this game have bad textures? The other Ubisoft AC games (Unity and Black Flag) I've played have had excellent graphics for their time. To me the vegetation and landscapes/cliff edges etc. in Black Flag seem to look more detailed & better than their counterparts do in Odyssey.

What's up with this? It seems very strange?

[Mr.Hmm]

If my understanding is correct, the Textures are 2k not 4k.

I could be wrong tho since i do not have much experience on the matter.

[Nii nii nii]

the textures are very nice for me

[Ogami]

Its because the game engine used is constantly streaming textures in the background.
The whole " no loading times" in the massive open world takes its toll on higher texture quality.

Also, take a look on what setting your Anti Aliasing is on, the game has this peculiar method for AA in which on LOW or MEDIUM it actually re-scales your textures to a lower resolution.

Only OFF and HIGH dont have that.

[Nii nii nii]

playing in ultra and the game is amazing nice textures

[Ceriss]

They downscaled after Unity because console performance, and they have to have parity because some console player that doesn't even know when their fps is dropping below 30 might whine that a more expensive and powerful machine is playing a visually superior version.

Models are better but environment textures are pretty poor besides water.

I could swear most of the trees are from AC1 and AC2 honestly.

[Zloth]

No way to tell if you're having a problem unless you post a screenshot!

[CombedPumpkin]

I hear what you are saying but to capture the scope and depth the devs did in UHD-everything, the game would have to be a couple terabytes there is just SOOO much content despite everyone saying this is copied this and copied that and cities are samey looks in low-rez.....YEAH, you try to make a 3D video game this big and give every object UHD go for it. Good luck finding a system to run it (unless you're a liquid-cooled guru with SLI expertise).

[Dragon]

Originally posted by CombedPumpkin:

Good luck finding a system to run it (unless you're a liquid-cooled guru with SLI expertise).

But if that is so, then why is it possible to make Witcher 3 with HD mods look better than Odyssey in many ways, given that Witcher 3 is much older? And plenty of people run Witcher 3 with lots of HD mods just fine, without any mystical or super elite SLI hardware.

I don't get how a game from 2015 (Witcher 3) can graphically out-class an Ubisoft game from 2018 (Odyssey)?

[Nii nii nii]

Odissey is superior to witcher 3 in graphics just look at the building there is a lot od details in Odissey there is not in thewitcher 3

[Dionysus 🐭]

So many people here are uninformed, or just don't know what effect higher resolution textures would have. Proper 4k PBR materials would make the game look so much better, you don't truly know how good high resolution textures alone would look until you create 4k materials.

Originally posted by Ogami:

Its because the game engine used is constantly streaming textures in the background.
The whole " no loading times" in the massive open world takes its toll on higher texture quality.

Also, take a look on what setting your Anti Aliasing is on, the game has this peculiar method for AA in which on LOW or MEDIUM it actually re-scales your textures to a lower resolution.

Only OFF and HIGH dont have that.

AC Odyssey already has horrible asset streaming. The engine loads, then unloads and later reloads the same assets hundreds of thousands of times over the course of an hour, that is why the CPU load is so high (it's not DRM). Luckily Special K fixes this, but higher resolution textures wouldn't make that much of a difference to the already horrible optimization.

And the antialiasing doesn't lower texture resolution. Anything but high will lower the rendering resolution and then upscale it back to your native resolution, but that is pretty much unnoticeable due to Ubisoft's amazing temporal upscaling tech (look at WD2 if you don't know what I mean). However, that has nothing to do with texture resolution, and low (or high) resolution textures will still have a huge impact no matter what resolution you are running at.

Originally posted by CombedPumpkin:

I hear what you are saying but to capture the scope and depth the devs did in UHD-everything, the game would have to be a couple terabytes there is just SOOO much content despite everyone saying this is copied this and copied that and cities are samey looks in low-rez.....YEAH, you try to make a 3D video game this big and give every object UHD go for it. Good luck finding a system to run it (unless you're a liquid-cooled guru with SLI expertise).

Obviously no one means 4k everything, but every ground, wall, armor, weapon, clothing, and skin texture can easily be at 4k, with the less important stuff having a lower resolution texture. And no it would not take up terabytes of space, just look at FFXV, the HD texture pack updated the game with higher resolution textures on a huge amount of stuff, and only needed an extra 50GB of storage space. Also keep in mind that the FFXV HD texture pack updating some of the pre-rendered videos/cutscenes to 4k, the actual textures themselves only take around 15GB of extra space, the rest are videos (videos are actually what takes up a majority of storage space in video games nowadays).

In addition, textures will not affect performance unless you don't have enough VRAM. Anything with 8GB of VRAM or more will be able to run HD textures with very little performance impact. Anybody with less 8GB will likely get a lot of stutter and texture pop in, due to not having enough VRAM.

[Nii nii nii]

aaronth7 texture dont affect game performance.... yes it will 6go vram use 2.5 in game in ultra 1080p 60 fps OK change texture res to medium just for testing Oo 80 fps 1080 p what ??? so YES texture setting affect in game performance ( return to ultra i got my 60 it's perfect for me ^^ )

[Dionysus 🐭]

Originally posted by Nii nii nii:

aaronth7 texture dont affect game performance.... yes it will 6go vram use 2.5 in game in ultra 1080p 60 fps OK change texture res to medium just for testing Oo 80 fps 1080 p what ??? so YES texture setting affect in game performance ( return to ultra i got my 60 it's perfect for me ^^ )

What?

I never said it would affect performance if you have enough VRAM.

[Shodan]

Can you post a screenshot of your issue so that we can see what's wrong?

[Dionysus 🐭]

Originally posted by unturorum:

Can you post a screenshot of your issue so that we can see what's wrong?

The Reddit post has a few screenshots of more low resolution/blurry textures.

It's not a user specific issue, it's an issue with the game.

[Jim Jones flavoured Slurpee]

After playing like 44 hours on 1080 then getting a 34 inch curved qhd ips monitor the textures look 100 times better on the new monitor.