We are thrilled to announce that 4k Textures are now available in published experiences! Thank you for all the feedback you provided during the Studio Beta phase.
Using 4k textures is as simple as uploading a high resolution image asset and then referencing it in your experience. If a client device has enough resources to handle it and the engine determines that a high resolution texture is justified for a given object and view point, it will transcode and stream it at up to 4k resolution.
The Foundation: Texture Streaming
4k textures are possible because of the foundation laid by our recently shipped Texture Streaming system.
Texture Streaming intelligently manages video memory by dynamically loading and unloading texture mips based on the importance of each object in the scene and the available memory. Instead of keeping every high-resolution texture mip in memory at once, the engine now streams in the highest quality mipmaps only when they are needed.
This allows us to unlock rendering at up to 4k resolution (4096 x 4096) for your textures without significantly impacting the memory footprint or crash rates on lower-end devices. If a device cannot handle or doesn’t need the full 4k texture, Texture Streaming will automatically serve a lower-resolution version that fits its memory budget.
Crisp Surface Details: SurfaceAppearance maps (Color, Normal, Metalness, Roughness) can now utilize 4k textures, making PBR materials look sharper than ever.
Immersive Environments: Large-scale assets like massive meshes and architectural walls will no longer suffer from pixelation when viewed up close.
Future-Proofing: You can already import image assets at up to 8k resolution today into Roblox. These are stored at original quality, and will be transcoded down to 4k. As hardware and the engine improves over time, these will automatically be upgraded for higher-end devices while still performing well on current devices thanks to texture streaming.
Known Issues
Import times for 4k textures may be longer than 1k images and may take longer to transcode and become available at full 4k resolution when you first import them into Studio
The Roblox base material textures are still in the process of being upgraded to 4k. Keep an eye out for a new Studio Beta in about a month where we will make these available for you to test out.
We Want Your Feedback!
Your feedback and bug reports were very important in getting this out, so please keep those coming. We’re also very excited to see what you are able to build with this so please feel free to keep sharing screenshots of your creations too!
Will 4k textures be enabled in gui instances, stuff like 4k loading screen images would be nice. It would also be nice if developers can manually choose to have instances to have 4k textures such as larger creature models.
Please add a setting which forces textures to remain at 1024x1024 (or maybe even lower!). I do not want to nuke my data limit because of this. I’m sure new developers will not understand how to optimise and will opt to just slap the highest quality textures onto everything they can, without regards for bandwidth or network usage.
This is not about using them in studio. Since this is now available on the Roblox Player, this means any game can have 4k textures. That’s the issue. I don’t want to see my network usage jump up 100 mb in the span of a few seconds just because a developer thought it’s a smart idea to use high-quality textures for everything. This is why I’d like there to be a limit on the player on what size the textures are allowed to be streamed in.
Even something such as a Fast Flag would be good enough!
Yeah, it would be great if you could control this on the players end. I imagine if you can it’s done automatically based on device or the graphics scale we have but some more precise controls would be great.
I think it would be a good time to mention that graphics quality slider should be split into several options, to give users better control over the individual aspects of graphics they care about most. For example: Some might want to save bandwidth by lowering texture quality, while others might prioritize render distance in first person shooter games.
Ohhh this is so exciting!!! We’ve wanted this for years. I’ll be updating Cliffside and checking this out maybe in the next week. Couldn’t be more pumped! Thank you Roblox!
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