I have noticed recently (January 2024) that myself and a lot of my friends have been noticing that Roblox for whatever reason is compressing materials of parts in experiences. Please can this bug be fixed as it makes experiences look absolutely hideous.
My system has no issue in regards to hardware availability, and this issue is occuring in experiences where it was previously not an issue; System Specifications: 12th gen i5 12600k (10 core, base 3.69GHz), 16gb of DDR4 RAM (3200MHz), RTX 3060ti with 16gb VRAM, and 600-750mbps internet connection.
This is an issue even when it sometimes chooses not to compress them to this degree. Compared to studio, the resolution and compression of materials is ABYSMAL on the client, even though the client would be rendering far less as it limits the distance parts are rendered at as well as not rendering studio-exclusive things? The client should have more control over the quality of what is rendered, especially for users whom know their system can handle the natural resolution of materials and textures.
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Below are two images of the same location from within my experience, first in studio, second in the client:
While I first noticed this issue in my experience, this issue affects most experiences with adequate detail, so I can only presume that this is Roblox poorly detecting hardware availability being lower than it actually is. I would appreciate for Roblox to allow the user to have more control over the performance the client will attempt to use, such as material and texture resolution quality, render distance, etc.
Quite frankly this is getting ridiculous, the quality control for client updates is SHOCKINGLY nonexistent, the amount of bugs over the many years I’ve been using the platform that get added to the client that BAREBONES testing would reveal as an issue is SHAMEFUL. Please do better, if you can afford to buy random companies, you can afford to put more money into R&D and Quality Assurance.
I also have this issue, even with a good amount of both VRAM and RAM. Sometimes it actually flickers between both the normal textures and the low quality ones. It happens randomly, but it’s definitely frequent.
I can confirm that this randomly happens despite memory being low. I never hit anywhere above 80% when playing Roblox and it randomly makes the textures go to nearly 1x1 resolution. I have 8GB of VRAM, so what gives? The issue is never present in Roblox Studio from what I have tested, which runs at nearly 90% memory compared to the Roblox Player
I’ve noticed the Fabric, Concrete and Wood materials compressing so far in Blood and Iron (I haven’t played any other game the past few days), and it happens about 40% of the time.
I sometimes notice visible flickering between the HD and the compressed textures between 1-5 minutes of joining the game, then it either permanently stays compressed or HD. The only fix I have so far is to rejoin and hope it doesn’t happen again.
I have 16 GB ram and Nvidia RTX 2070, and this doesn’t occur in Studio for me in any of the places I’ve tried loading.
This is a shocking “feature” which is resulting in significant loss in visual quality across all of my places. I’ve found a workaround for the time being. In the folder where your ROBLOX install is located (e.g. where the Player EXE files are), create a folder called “ClientSettings”, and create a file called ClientAppSettings.json
Inside this file, copy and paste the following line, then save the file. {"FIntTextureCompositorLowResFactor":"4","DFFlagEnableRequestAsyncCompression":"false"}
After that, when relaunched, textures should now work properly.
“Request Async Compression” appears to be the feature at fault, though it seems to be an intentional change. Personally, I’d go as far as to say that this so-called feature simply shouldn’t exist on desktop devices without an off-switch in the user’s graphics settings since the sheer amount of loss in texture quality without any prior warning is simply unacceptable for both players and developers.
The fact that this has even shipped, for desktop users, is appalling.
This happens consistently and seems to be either a reduction in Roblox’s VRAM cap or its hardware throttling limit not respecting the VRAM cap. Either way, Roblox NEED to have better settings for the player and need to meet the industry standard for graphics settings, such as allowing players to control the VRAM cap, force texture quality and render distance, etc., Rather than a single very obscure graphics level which isn’t even respected most of the game (ie this bug).
This occurs moreso on experiences with more visual instances (parts, meshes) or when I have other programs using VRAM (yet my GPU still has more than enough spare VRAM) such as Roblox Studio. I have no performance issues and I have plenty of hardware being unutilised, and my system also has a very cool temperature under heavy load (low 80C) so there is definitely no thermothrottling occuring.
The main issues with this is that the user has no in-app control over the VRAM cap, AND if VRAM usage drops, the textures are NOT uncompressed within the same session.
Users should be able to force textures to stay uncompressed. If I can run my experience in studio (where no render distance exists) at level 21 quality, then the client shouldn’t be reducing performance utilisation at ALL (noting that Studio uses far more resources than the client).
here are something that I’ve noticed about the issue -
seems to be only affect places with relatively large part counts and causing the engine to auto-adjust texture quality for performance boost (while quality setting is set to “Manual”)
causing mesh texture, material texture to flicker during the texture quality auto-adjust
although the texture quality being adjusted to lower quality, the process on auto-adjusting (flickering) actually appears to be CPU intensive and result in low FPS for a while
after the auto-adjusting, all affected textures stay in low quality and didnt appear to revert to full quality even for a while
only happens on my dev place with high part counts while my testing place with low part counts being unaffected
seems only happen on some servers but not everytime joining the game (AB testing in progress?)
Another reason that this should be an opt-in or atleast opt-out setting, not FORCED upon people. Increasing CPU usage could cause instability for many computers on particular experiences.
People should just be able to choose the material compression quality (or none at all), and that should only affect newly loaded parts (joining an experience or streaming service)
(2k monitor, leaderboard GUI included for reference.)
I have 16 gigabytes of ram. I doubt most games will even us a significant portion of 4gb ram. How will this help memory usage on my machine, or others? This feature should be entirely opt-in and not forced upon people.
reposting some of my findings from other post - 
