What ticks me off about modern AAA games, and the “texture size” reason for large file size being mentioned in these comments, is just how misguided the effort is.

If your game is running in UE5 (as many modern AAA titles are), it probably has forced TAA and a bunch of other unoptimized garbage. With the TAA and misc frame interpolation nonsense you inevitably get smearing and weird shadows.

Who cares if you can make out individual hairs on a character whose hand just smear melded into the background for a few seconds? None of those fine textures are visible through the motion blur and bloom lighting and post-processing filters anyway. It’s absurd.

I’ve been playing The Talos Principle: Reawakening recently, which is a 2025 remake of the 2014 game, fresh with all of the UE5 bells and whistles. The old game looked pretty good, despite being made by a smaller team. It was a bit austere, but that fit with the theme and setting of the game. The new version looks objectively worse to me. Sure it has raytracing, but everything is a little blurry now even if you tweak the settings. As someone who loathes TAA I also can’t help but noting the smearing. In a game where noticing the details is important to solving the puzzles, focusing quickly on things matters. Sometimes I don’t even see an important laser connector tool until my third time in an area. Also, since it’s unoptimized as is par for the course, my 4090 isn’t enough to fight the frame dips down for a stuttery 30 fps in certain areas.

I’m sure there’s games where the larger textures have an impact, but if you’re burying them under several layers of blurry filters, I don’t see the point.