Ludicrous Skyrim mod gives dragons 16K textures

pcgamer.com:

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is over a decade old, but remains by a distance the most popular title on mod database NexusMods. The fact it's been out so long also means that most of the things you could think of doing with it have already happened, and so you get some slightly unusual stuff in these twilight years. My eyebrows raised a little when I saw tens of thousands of people downloading a mod to upgrade its cage models to 4K(opens in new tab).

4K? Lol, says the group of modders behind one of Skyrim's latest mods, and lmao. Creators wrig675, XilaMonstrr and I2edShift are behind the snappily named 'Bellyaches 16K-8K Dragon Replacer Pack(opens in new tab)', which retextures all dragons in vanilla Skyrim, «now cleaned of compression artifacts and upscaled to a maximum of 8K resolution. Original textures were BC3 compression and a ix of 1K, 2K and 4K resolution. Now they're in 4K, 8K and 16K resolution, with BC3 compression and full mipmaps.»

Now, this might seem like a tiny bit of overkill. 4K may be more widely adopted now, but plenty of folk still play in 1080p, and who plays in 16K? The mod team behind these 16K dragons, however, have their reasons.

«All resolutions specified are the maximum resolution, and most of the texture files are twice as long as they are wide. So the 16K version has files that are 8192x16384. Dragons are VERY large, and I would recommend that you think of this as two 8K files next to each other rather than full 8K.

»With 16K, a dragon wing is 7380x4020px, a head is 3320x2480px, and the entire rear body and legs is only 6080x4580px. If you are fighting a dragon up close and want to see it in 4K resolution, then you need the dragon to be in 16K."

So there you go: As the Dragonborn gets up in a