How Uncharted 4’s artists created their amazing landscapes via @VentureBeat

For example, with respects to textures and materials, the previous games on the PS3 were limited to a total of 138MB of texture memory [VRAM] visible onscreen at one time Uncharted 4 which has a limit of 1.5GB.
Between the more complex PBR shader, light maps, environment maps, particles, sky domes, wrinkle maps,
etc. that vram got gobbled up fast which required us to come up with more sophisticated methods of texture streaming and material optimization.

Prior to Uncharted 4, we did not use as many level of detail [LOD] meshes to optimize geometry count.
In Uncharted 4 we used this almost everywhere — we had LODs almost on 60 percent of the assets in-game, which means the environmental team would have to support these assets in all aspects from modeling, collision, shadow proxies, and shaders.