«The Emperor provides!» as the famous saying goes, and today the Emperor—in the form of Saber Interactive and Focus Entertainment—has provided a 4K texture pack for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, a big-time graphical upgrade that promises to make your squad of Ultramarines look as pretty as they possibly can.
The 4K texture pack is free, and installing it is simple: Just download it from Steam or Epic and restart the game. But there are a couple things you should probably know before you go rushing off to click.
First of all, this thing is huge. Space Marine 2 requires 75GB of storage normally, but the 4K texture pack jacks that requirement up to 160GB. That's right, the texture pack is bigger than the whole damn game. In fact, it's bigger than a bunch of entire games on our list of the PC's mightiest storage hogs from 2021.
Second, you're going to need some real juice under the hood to make the effort worthwhile. The minimum system requirement for the 4K texture pack exceeds the recommended requirement for the base game. Dare to compare:
Just for fun, here's the recommended spec for the 4K texture pack:
That's a lot, and lest you think Saber and Focus are kidding around, early reviews on Steam strongly suggest otherwise. Those with truly heavy iron say it looks glorious, but players who have slightly less horsepower at their fingertips are struggling. I have no way to confirm it (all of this is just reminding me that my own personal rig is growing increasingly potato-like) but a few users have said the 12GB VRAM recommendation really isn't adequate, and that 16 or 24GB is needed if you really want to run it full screamer.
The good news is that aside from an admittedly hefty chunk of download time and storage space, there's really nothing to lose if you want to try your luck. If you find the performance isn't where you want it to be, simply uninstall the texture pack and you'll be back to the original, still-very-pretty textures.
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