All of those are in good faith. A part of it is in bad faith as well though. Studios forgoing or at least deprioritizing optimalisation. Why waste weeks on Q&A when you can just yawn and tell consumers to upgrade if it doesn’t affect your bottom line?
Case in point: COD MWIII All of the internet is (rightly) shitting on it but Activision won’t care because they’ll likely still sell several million copies. What incentive does that give them to NOT fire entire Q&A departments and pocket those cost savings on top of the profits?
QA what? You can’t QA and optimise huge ass textures to fit into a gig. I can tell you a story about high res images. My partner is a photographer. She did a commissioned project of 7 collage photos to be printed in large scale. She bought a 512 gig drive to work on a project. These 7 photos took 95% of the space of this drive in the end. Yeah, 500 gigs for 7 bloody photos!
They are collages, meaning that each PSD file contains multiple super high res photos. But the end result is just 7 huge pictures on the wall.
As for the final pixel size, I don’t remember now, but they’re over 100mpx of 32 bit per channel of image data (that’s 16 bytes per each pixel instead of regular 4).