It was clear something wasn't right when IO Interactive originally released the PC specifications for the upcoming 007 First Light, and now they've been sorted.
Fidelity creep is also a thing. Unless you’re going for a deliberately retro or stylized look, you need high detail assets and lots of them on screen at once. Otherwise you’ll never hear the end of “gaem bad cuz PS2 grafix lol.”
Environment textures are huge. Main character textures are huge. And you’re not loading just one file, you’re loading multiple files per model. The diffuse map, the specular map, the reflection map, the normal map, the subsurface scattering map for any organic models. And gods help you if your character model has interchangeable parts, because you’ll be loading the whole set of textures for every element of those as well. These things add up very quickly.
And you still need space in the RAM for your code and physics and worldsim calculations, animations, everything going on under the hood. So I dunno, 16 doesn’t sound outlandish these days.
Fidelity creep is also a thing. Unless you’re going for a deliberately retro or stylized look, you need high detail assets and lots of them on screen at once. Otherwise you’ll never hear the end of “gaem bad cuz PS2 grafix lol.”
Environment textures are huge. Main character textures are huge. And you’re not loading just one file, you’re loading multiple files per model. The diffuse map, the specular map, the reflection map, the normal map, the subsurface scattering map for any organic models. And gods help you if your character model has interchangeable parts, because you’ll be loading the whole set of textures for every element of those as well. These things add up very quickly.
And you still need space in the RAM for your code and physics and worldsim calculations, animations, everything going on under the hood. So I dunno, 16 doesn’t sound outlandish these days.