[Request] Higher quality commander textures

2 gb cards are definitely not considered adequate anymore. A lot of major PC titles are using 4-6 gb's of vram with high to ultra settings. Dying Light, Shadows of Mordor to name a few. As 4k displays become more mainstream even older games will need more vram. Nvidia is about to launch a refresh of the 980 GTX and 970 GTX with 8 GB of vram in March. Video cards are definitely moving towards larger memory pools and it's good for developers to plan ahead. AMD and Nvidia have had 4gb cards for the last 3 generations now. 2 GB is definitely starting to be a bit dated now.

First 2 GB card was released in 2008, 4 GB followed in 2010 with the AMD 5970 4 GB. 4 GB cards have been around for almost 5 years now.

The most common amount of VRAM in a gamer's PC (according to the Steam hardware survey) is 1GB. Let's not start getting silly because a few people have high end GPUs. Cards with more than 2GB VRAM represent only ~8% of the market.

I downloaded and installed it without issue just now.

Hey I am not saying everyone should run out and buy new video cards tomorrow. I am just saying that the trend is moving towards larger amounts of vram.

BTW according to steam statistics 43.03 % of users have at least 2 GB or greater VRAM. I think that's actually pretty significant.

Now due to these amazing better textures, I have an urge to buy many more commanders from the armory

somehow in someway Uber always finds a way

Best devs ever

it worked for me, looks great

Other devs would release this as a for-pay DLC. Uber puts it up on PAMM as a free mod!

It's actually 29.44% - I don't think you can count "Other" as > 2GB
A majority of that amount are 2 GB; very few have greater - I think that will become the sweet spot for targeting VRAM capacity for the reasonable future. You are certainly correct in saying that's it's trending upwards though.

Uh, yes, this has been true since the dawn of VRAM. It doesn't say anything in regards to the pace of change. It's like saying a requirement for 16GB RAM would be fine because RAM is trending up.

You included other in that number, didn't you? That's not what other means.

Congratulations, you managed to break the php of pa-mods.com intermittently. Whenever it notices an updated mod it downloads it, and this mod is too big for it to handle

Until I fix it, hitting refresh should load the page correctly.

Woohoo! You guys break our game with your mods, I break your sites with my mod. Muahaha!

*cough*

Maybe it needs to be broken up like I said it might. Not really sure how it would be split, especially since it would have to be split up a lot.

It doesn't need to be split for my sake, it probably should be for PAMM though (I tried downloading through PAMM and it stalled, had to download from the github). It seems like a good idea to do one mod per commander (so people can HD their own commander easily), and one more mod which requires them all (so people who can, can HD everything easily).

+1 That's a good solution.

Shadow of Mordor doesn't use that much RAM at all. Even with all the highest settings and >1080p, the ram usage doesn't rise above 4GB. Dev's really love to completely overplay that stuff.
Reminds me of the hidden auto-downgrade of shogun 2 going amok all the time. *shudder*

Otherwise SoM is still a console game, primarily made for a bunch of pretty weak machines with ~5.5GB shared memory available for CPU and GPU. You can upscale a open world games requirements to ridiculous levels (heard of that PA thing?), but that doesn't really mean much.

As a gamer i'm more interested in the results than the background, and there really hasn't been much of a graphical improvement to deliver a good justification for higher requirements (even if there might be a technical one). Most modern, demanding games are either made for consoles or/and horribly optimized (bf4, unity, etc).

True, but if I was in the market to get a gpu today, it would be silly to get a 2 gb version. It's obvious that games are starting to use more and more vram and you are only going to shoot yourself in the foot down the road if you are not at least entertaining the idea of planning for the future. For about 8 years, games were pretty stagnant in the 1-2gb of vram usage but that's starting to change now. If you are ok running games on medium settings then by all means, buy a 2 gb video card.

certainly yes, considering even my 2013 card is already equipped with 2GB. However it still feels kinda silly to even get anything new at all to me. Maybe I just don't play enough games or something, but I feel recently there have not been the hardware improvements required to get me to spent money again. My Radeon 7850/2G runs all games I want to play at max details (well I think the last "big graphics" title I played was crysis 3) so why buy anything new.... I really wanted to spent money a few times on new hardware in the last year or so, searched the market and realized that I basically could not find new stuff that made the big step I wanted. Damn you hardware manufacturers, I'd pay so much money for a cpu that can run super big PA servers for example xD

For long time use 2GB wouldn't be a wise choice, but something like a GTX960 is still a good deal. I'm actually still using a GTX660 and it's surprising just how well it works for most games. Maybe i'll have to go for high/med to get 60fps in BF4, but that game looks horrible anyway with it's postproc and the artificial optic (THE EYES). Other stuff like Alien, Assetto Corsa or Wolfenstein works just fine maxed out.

The only demanding stuff atm seem to be open world games like SoM or Dying Light. And they really never look too convincing anyway, no matter what settings you use.

I'd probably go for a >2GB card, but i didn't found the impressive new title yet who'd actually justify that thing.

660 gtx is a pretty good card. I agree that I wouldn't totally consider an upgrade. I did however play a lot of games 3d so I need the extra performance. The only game now I wish I could max is dying light (it's an awesome game). I only have a pair of 680 GTX 2 gb because my video card died before the 4 gb came out and I needed a replacement asap. I wish I could had gone 4 gb now. Thinking about picking up a 980 Gtx 8 gb when they come out so I can be set for the next few years.

Witcher 3 is definitely something I'm concerned I won't be able to enjoy maxed out.

@bgolus
I took the textures and put them into a new github repo, packaged up ready into separate mods (with icons). If I shouldn't have taken them out of your repo I can delete it: https://github.com/pamods/HD-Commander-Textures

Not sure of the best way to put them on PAMM. I would normally create a repo for each and use the commit archive, but that would spam the pamods organisation on github (which only has 34 repos as is, adding 45 repos would be impolite at least). I don't mind spamming my account with them, but as it's not my content that seems a strange thing to do. Suggestions?

BTW, so many dependencies

Nope, totally happy with you guys splitting it up.