Why decompress on the fly? For a lot of things the crazy high-res textures aren’t needed or appreciated while playing. I downloaded some newer FTP Quake title. It had 30 fucking GB for like a dozen maps or so. It is a god damn arena shooter. You are way to busy jumping around, making fast paced shots and so on, to ever appreciate that the texture is still detailed, when you are pressing your virtual face against ist. And it takes so much more ressources because the texture needs to be loaded in the VRAM and then scaled down anyways because you aren’t pressing your face against it.
Why decompress on the fly? For a lot of things the crazy high-res textures aren’t needed or appreciated while playing. I downloaded some newer FTP Quake title. It had 30 fucking GB for like a dozen maps or so. It is a god damn arena shooter. You are way to busy jumping around, making fast paced shots and so on, to ever appreciate that the texture is still detailed, when you are pressing your virtual face against ist. And it takes so much more ressources because the texture needs to be loaded in the VRAM and then scaled down anyways because you aren’t pressing your face against it.