Do video cards affect draw/view distances beyond game settings?

[balane]

I have a specific example. My desktop has a GTX 680 2GB, my laptop has a 5870M 1GB.

In Warcraft I have both settings of View Distance set to Ultra. It is clear that I can see further in the game on my desktop than I can on my laptop. I log off and on between the two, under the same game conditions, and it's quite apparent that the desktop draws terrain and landscape out considerably further.

So, even with the setting on Ultra is my distance limited by the laptop's video card?

 

[Piotrsama]

Can you take pictures to compare?

 

[alcoholbob]

No they don't. GPUs render what they are told. There's a reason why old Bioware Aurora games from back in 2002 are still chugging at 30 fps on a GTX Titan on certain maps. Because programmers back then didn't realize you could improve performance by not rendering everything offscreen. Well, they probably knew it but either didn't know how to fix it, or were too lazy. Morrowind had that problem too. I think it was already 2003 when RPG programmers decided to go back to programming school and learn occlusion culling.

 

[balane]

Yes, sure, I can do that as soon as time allows. Will update post at that time.

 

[lyssword]

maybe because the game can load more textures on 2gb than 1gb?

 

[DaveSimmons]

A setting might not be exactly one distance. These settings terms mean whatever the game designer makes them, there isn't an industry standard.

"Ultra" in GAME X might mean "exactly 100 feet" or it might mean "100 - 1,000 feet depending on the GPU". It's up to the developers. In GAME Y it might mean "78.647 feet" regardless of GPU.

 

[parvadomus]

It is possible if it is a driver cheat for the GPU to perform better. This has been used since the first hardware accelerated GPUs.
Lower quality textures, subpar quality filtering, tweaked z-far distances and maybe viewports that bring better performance, are just examples.
I remember a lot of this issues on Nvidia cards (of the GF4 - FX era, it was really common).

 

[DaveSimmons]

Yes, both ATI and nvidia have been caught over the years for both outright cheating and for making questionable adjustments to their image quality defaults that required settings changes to get back the full image quality. That is a possibility.

Or as I said above, the game itself could be applying the "ultra" label to different image quality for different GPUs.

 

[Yuriman]

Depending on the aspect ratio you might also have a further draw distance too.

 

[Enigmoid]

Are the other settings at ultra too? Just asking because something like 'object quality' could possibly affect the quality of far drawn objects as well as draw distance.

 

[lyssword]

what about anistrophic filtering/ fxaa whatever other stuff there is?

 

[imaheadcase]

None of that matters, Ultra settings just donates graphic settings (more trees, more detailed textures, etc). Draw distance, that is based on engine scaling it for each machine.

 

[lakedude]

Are you using the same display and resolution for both machines?

 

[KingFatty]

Maybe the "Ultra" setting in this particular game actually means "Use all available video memory" and therefore will show as much depth as your video card memory can accommodate.

After you do your screenshots, that will provide examples for 1 GB and 2 GB. Maybe someone could do the same screenshot using 3 GB too? That would be a good way to test.

But I could see how the ultra settings simply mean "off the chain" and just use up all available RAM, so having more video ram makes it look even more ultra.

 

[imaheadcase]

I've yet to find ultra settings using all the ram on my 1.5gig cards. However it is a laptop and prob shares system memory.