If a game was to be released next February, is it possible to use 1600x1200 24-bit Textures? By that time could the consumers'' computers be capable to run that if the level geometry is fairly simple?

I think that might be stretching it a bit. Sure, high-end machines (like mine ) would probably be able to handle it, but I doubt the average desktop system would.

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Martee
http://www.csc.uvic.ca/~mdill

How about 1200 x 800 resolution 24-bit image. Would that be reasonable for the average computer of next february?

at the minute most video cards are limited to 2048x2048 textures.
in less the a year? i expect to see more textures, but the resolution will most likely steeple at 512x512 for now. Remember that Voodoo3 cards have a max texture bandwidth of 256x256. (I know, next year anyone serious about gaming will NOT have a Voodoo3 spluttering uunder the hood!)

I think you must remember that textures will have to utilise compression in order to use 1024x0124+ textures properly. DXTC is still "new" (S3TC isn''t, this is what it''s renamed to)

Im short. No.
how many 1024x1024 texture per scene btw?

www.stephen-hawes.co.uk

I wouldn´t. 800x600 has just become standard (remember diablo II), and imo it´s enough for everything.. and you shouldn´t piss off low end users (as in 350Mhz, TNT or TNT2 standard), there´s a lot of them out there.

Thanks for the advice all.
How much of a difference is there really? Does anyone know a place where you can go look at different resolutions of the same texture and see the difference?