Star Citizen To Get Massive 8K UHD Resolution

This is from WCCFtech.

PC Exclusive Star Citizen To Get Massive 8K UHD Resolution Thanks To Freedom From Consoles

Star Citizen is the not-so-little PC Exclusive title that the entire Industry is watching, and recently the devs have stated that it is going to natively support 4K and 8K UHD Resolutions. The reason they can easily do this is because of the flexibility they get when they don’t have to worry about consoles .

Devs: Star Citizen Getting Native 4K and 8K Resolutions – Result of Independence from Consoles

I have been following Star Citizen for a very very long time. I knew about it before the title actually went public on Kick-starter; when it was just an idea floating in a secret forum. And I still have my legacy forum account and Golden Ticket to prove it. Almost two years and some 60 Million Dollars later, Star Citizen now stands as an absolute behemoth in the video game industry. It is the one AAA-Budget title that has dared to break Industry norms and trodden down the path that will give the PC Platform a better identity. Needless to say, pretty much the fate of the entire PC Industry hangs in the balance and it has everything to loose now. If Star Citizen falls, it would be very difficult for the PC Industry to recover and get itself taken seriously again. So far however, everything is looking real good.

It is fitting that the flagship of PC Gaming will become the first game to support 4k and 8k UHD Resolutions natively. Since the game won’t run on consoles due to its absolutely insane requirements, this frees the devs to perfect the game’s visuals and mechanics without having to worry about optimizing for low powered hardware. Not to mention the fact that Mr. Robert has stated on occasion that he doesn’t care about consoles. Star Citizen will support insanely huge texture sizes, the likes of 8192×8192 and maybe even 16k, to make sure that players don’t get blurry textures when playing at high resolutions. This means that ingame entities will look just as beautiful in close up, as they do from afar.

It is worth mentioning, that Star Citizen on 8K Resolution will probably work on insanely high end configurations. Think Tri or Quad GPU configs. Nvidia and AMD better get their scaling issues out of the way by then because, at resolutions and configurations this big, the slightest scaling difference will tilt sales heavily. Needless to say, the amount of people who have got the dough required to run SC on 8K will be very few. Common folk such as myself will be gaming happily at 1440p.

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And KitGuru

Star Citizen to support 4K, 8K UHD resolutions, won’t run on consoles

November 3rd, 2014 at 5:15 pm - Author Anton Shilov

Star Citizen, an upcoming space trading and combat simulator video game that is developed by legendary Chris Roberts, has already become the highest raising crowdfunded project of all time and is the first AAA crowdfunded video game. Apparently, the title could also become the first video game that will natively support both 4K and 8K ultra-high-definition (UHD) resolutions.

At the PAX Australia 2014 event Chris Roberts, the founder of Cloud Imperium Games, which develops Star Citizen, revealed that since the game is a PC-exclusive title and is not developed with video game consoles in mind, the company is working on ultra-high-resolution textures, which may indicate that the game is designed for future UHD displays.

According to Chris Roberts, who spoke to TweakTown web-site, the development team is working on 4K and 8K textures and is “pushing the boundaries of the DirectX 11 and Mantle application programming interfaces.” By the time Star Citizen hits the market, DirectX 12 and improved Mantle APIs will be available, hence, what sounds like extreme today, will be more or less mainstream in 2016 or 2017, when Star Citizen hits the market. Cloud Imperium Games has no plans to make Star Citizen available on video game consoles, therefore, the company has a lot of flexibility when it comes to system requirements.

“I don’t care about consoles,” said Mr. Roberts.

While many titles today are designed for beyond 1080p resolutions and some are developed with ultra-high-definition displays with 4K resolutions in mind, Star Citizen will likely be the first title that will also natively support 8K displays and will even include textures that do not magnify (i.e., get blurry) at 7680*4320 when a player gets up close to surfaces. In a bid to do that, game developers need to use the largest possible texture sizes. For example, for textures where the player can get close enough for 1:1 texel to pixel ratio (walls, floors, asteroids, extremely large objects, etc.), 4096*4096 or 8192*8192 textures provide the highest quality on ultra-high-definition displays.

While a number of games today use ultra-high-resolution textures in certain cases in a bid to provide additional details on modern monitors, 4K, 8K and 16K textures (such high-resolution textures are supported by multiple contemporary video game engines, including CryEngine 3/4, id Tech 5, etc.) are really needed for next-generation titles that will be played on UHD displays. The fact that Cloud Imperium Games throws in a number of 4K and 8K textures that is worth talking about may indicate that this is done for future PCs and for ultra-high-definition resolutions, such as 4K (3840*2160 or 4096*2160) and even 8K (7680*4320).

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Soooo after reading this, who is going to wait for 16GB VRAM GPUs? :P

Holy crap! 8K?! Even the beast of rigs won't be able to run it at low settings with 60FPS.

Can DVI or HDMI or DP do 8k anyway? do the cables have the bandwidth?

DP 1.3 can I think. Though not 60Hz.

A shining example of what good devs can do without Sony and Microsoft holding them back.

This gem is going to be the next Crysis.

Is it 30Hz?

I'm running it today at 7680x1440 (three 27" 1440p monitors) on a 3770k @ 4.5ghz and dual 290xs, and even at that I have to drop the detail level to med or cut back on the res to keep the framerate consistently up in its current version. That's 11,059,200 pixels versus the 8,294,400 that a 4k monitor would require (although nowhere near an 8k monitor). Also that's without the super high res textures, obviously.

-Byshop

Future proof.

8k is crazy but i guess if this game is around for 10+ years it will be worth it. I doubt anyones gonna be gaming at 8k though for a long time. Even 4k is just coming into light with current gen cards... which in some games can actually do 4k on 1 gpu which is pretty nice.

Isn't 8k the max which monitors/tv will ever go because its the highest resolution the human eye can see?

This is how PC gaming used to be. With a good machine, you could play a game at medium to high settings but not necessarily max out what it could possibly do. Then a couple years later, you could come back to it with a newer PC and get even more out of it. These days people are obsessed with being able to run a game at "max" settings and if a current gen machine can't max out a game (like with GTA4) then they scream about how the game isn't optimized, not realizing that the "max" settings on the PC version are many times what the console counterparts are capapble of.

-Byshop

Nice, best PC news since ever, finally something is not restricted by consoles

8k = 33 million pixels. 1080p = 2 million

I want to see the PC that can run Star Citizen in 8k at playable fps lol

But, yeah they're making this game future proof by doing this.

Guess I better save up for a second 780ti.

I don't know. Wikipedia didn't list refresh rate, only that it could 8192*4320

Edit: Found this on Wikipedia.

• High-resolution displays and multiple displays with a single connection, via a hub or daisy-chaining.^[47]
  • HBR2 mode with 17.28 Gbit/s of effective video bandwidth allows four simultaneous 1080p60 displays (CEA-861 timings), stereoscopic 2,560 × 1,600 × 30 bit @120 Hz (CVT-R timings), or 4K UHDTV @60 Hz ^{[note 1]}
  • HBR3 mode with 25.92 Gbit/s of effective video bandwidth, using CVT-R2 timings, allows eight simultaneous 1080p displays ( 1,920 × 1,080 @60 Hz), stereoscopic4K UHDTV ( 3,840 × 2,160 @120 Hz), or 5K UHDTV ( 5,120 × 2,880 @60 Hz) each using 24 bit RGB, and up to 8K UHDTV ( 7,680 × 4,320 ) @60 Hz using 4:2:0 subsampling^[48]

vaporware cough

Wish these people would stop calling this game vaperware..Jiggly youl eat them words next year thats for sure..When this game starts getting hot an than people will flock to it in droves..Its already got a 600000 player following..Only fools say vaporware when they know nothing about this game..

The human eye doesn't have a resolution.

Yes, however the evolution in technology of resolution is much faster than the evolution of the human eye (which is still happening of course, but at a much slower rate) so there are theoretical (temporary) points when we will not be able to tell the difference in resolution at all due to these facts.

That is until you factor in augments of the body, (Cyborg if you will) lol, where we will develop cameras that can be used to augment physical sight, and improve its quality. Just as we will at one time have augments for hearing that will do the same.

All this being said I don't know if 8k is that (as explained above "temporary" ) ceiling, but I don't think that ceiling is much further from that. Although I could be wrong.

I didn't even know there were 8k displays in existence.

I already read that lol, it doesn't have conclusive evidence suggesting what the port/cable is capable of, so I didn't bring it into this discussion.

It could be like HDMI 1.4 and HDMI 2.0, the port is the same but a new processor and a "fat" cable. Again, these are just my assumptions, I could be wrong and DP could already be capable of 8k.

Star Citizen is really raising the bar for rest of the games .

I think im going to need 5 more GTX970s. I am happy they are pushing the limit here, we see too many PC games settling these days. News like this gets me excited for the future. Cant wait to pick up my 1440p gsync monitor, though maybe ill be upgrading to 8k in a couple of years!

Yeah, like Blizzard! Oh, wait...

Sounds awesome but it doesn't sound like a feature I would use at all. Is there even a TV that supports 8K or do you have to use multiple monitors to achieve 8K?

It looks more like a future proof option. So it won't be like many pre-2006 games that don't have widescreen support, or some more recent games that only had up to 1080p support so no 1200p, 1440p or 1600p, or also those games that don't support 21:9.

@nethernova:

Pc gaming is not just about graphics. There are many factors that limit Pc gaming when consoles are involved . Games like Starcraft 2 aren't possible on consoles because controller sucks for strategy games . Wings of liberty also looked pretty good on ultra settings back in 2010 and needed a pretty decent Pc to max it out at decent frame rates.

Waste of time imo.

by the time 8k is affordable... the overall engine will look dated, the game's models/animations etc will look dated... and all we'l end up having is textures that look too good for everything else... uncanny... and out of place.... somewhat like modded Skyrim... sure all themods are a good improvement.... but the basic flaws that can't be covered show through.