BF2 textures

[night]

can i assume using high textures is completely related to the cards ram right?
was considering grabbing a 9800p or xt 256mb for like a 40$ upgrade over my 9700p to hold me over for a while longer. my 97 doesnt oc all that well so that would be better as well.

and yes i know the nv stuff, but i cant find a 6600gt 256meg, or a 6800 256meg in agp. and i will not be upgrading til after christmas at the earliest

 

[43st]

I have a X850 PE w/ 256Mb and I can't run on high texture. I guess I could but it's really jerky the first time you hop in a chopper/plane. The textures for BF go into normal memory, any remaining get cached to the hard drive.

 

[Insomniak]

Originally posted by: night
can i assume using high textures is completely related to the cards ram right?
was considering grabbing a 9800p or xt 256mb for like a 40$ upgrade over my 9700p to hold me over for a while longer. my 97 doesnt oc all that well so that would be better as well.

and yes i know the nv stuff, but i cant find a 6600gt 256meg, or a 6800 256meg in agp. and i will not be upgrading til after christmas at the earliest

No.

It's system memory. If you have less than 2GB, forget about high textures.

I wouldn't worry about it - the game looks fantastic at all high, with textures and medium, and running 2xAA/4xAF. And all this on a 6600GT perfectly playable.

I'll move up to 2GB so I can max it, but not until the end of the year probably.

 

[Auric]

Is this a fact or speculation? Perhaps textures use VRAM and only when insuffucient get offloaded to system as normal. The System Requirements are "Video Card with at least 256 Mb of RAM" which suggests more is required to prevent offloading or "paging" to the system RAM. So, suppose 400 is required but there is only 256 available, then 144 must be "paged" to system. If the system RAM in turn is barely adequate or even insufficient -for example 1GB of which 650 is used by the game and 250 by system, then only 100 or less remains, which is not enough for the texture "paging", thus having to page to the HDD. Increasing system memory capacity thus does not elminate VRAM "paging" to system RAM, but just to HDD which is obviously the slowest in the chain. I would like to see some comparative VRAM tests (512 vs 256) with high and ultra high textures (manual video.con edit).