Do graphic cards have limitations on 'stuff' on screen?

[ComputerGuy2006]

Sometimes you play a game that you can max out at 60 fps (like oblivion), yet as you walk things in the distance will load (trees, grass, etc). This is even very obvious in ungine valley benchmark, where shadows/grass only load when you are within certain distance.

Why is this? Is this some sort of limitation on the amount of textures that can be loaded? Kind of like how rage seem to only load the textures you are actively looking at?

If that is some sort of limit on graphics card, then where is it from? Seems to me, if this is some sort of texture per video card limitation (or whatever) you would think that SLI/CF would result in the ability to have more stuff on the screen at once.

Or if this is all just a software limitation, then why don't games like oblivion (or ungine valley) allow us to set the 'view' distance if you have a more powerful video card...

 

[alcoholbob]

It's intentional programming. Early builds of Morrowwind and Aurora (Neverwinter Nights) would try to render everything on the map and even today some top end machines choke try to render some maps because of it. Programmers learned how to limit the rendering to preserve computational horsepower.

 

[Anarchist420]

Good question. I'm guessing software because the devs don't want the frame rate to be lower than they want it to be.

Many Software devs act like they'd get executed if they gave the end user choices. Same goes for driver devs.

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

It is because we do not have unlimited resources to render everything that can be rendered at once.

 

[Wall Street]

It isn't a limitation of the 'number' of anything that can be displayed. It is that either the card runs out of texture memory with too long draw distance and has to swap from system memory which causes slowdown, too many triangles need to be rendered which causes a slowdown because the GPU has finite geometry resources or too many objects need to be textured which causes a slowdown because the GPU has finite fillrate.