Vram question

[runzwithsizorz]

Is there a huge advantage on having 4 gig vram vs 3 gig gaming at 1080p? i.e. the 290 series vs Nvidia 780. Thinking of Witcher 3 and other next gen games.

 

[Anarchist420]

There might be but I can't answer for sure since I have no idea what the witcher 3 engine is going to be like. Whether it uses deferred rendering or forward rendering, the precision of the render targets, the depth buffer precision, the size of the textures, the compression ratio of the textures, what the as will be like, etc., etc.

If it is a dx11 game I would imagine it will not use proper aa which pretty much makes the extra ram not necessary. Dx 11 and dx9 have been atrocious. Dx9 didn't support full precision depth buffers and it is very hard to force good AA in dx11 apps. That might be because the devs have to use a certain pipeline instead of using extensions.

 

[24601]

There is absolutely none.

Revisit this at 20nm.

 

[Hdgamer]

Nope. Not even an issue at 4K yet. GPU's aren't powerful enough to take advantage of any game that will utilize that much ram at that resolution unless going multi-gpu at 4K. At 1600P and below between 2-3 gigs is all you'll need probably for a few more years.

 

[24601]

Nope. Not even an issue at 4K yet. GPU's aren't powerful enough to take advantage of any game that will utilize that much ram at that resolution unless going multi-gpu at 4K. At 1600P and below between 2-3 gigs is all you'll need probably for a few more years.

Not the reason. The reason is that higher resolution textures with actually higher resolution design (the artist side of the equation) is the most expensive part of game design. Pushing the pixels and pushing the texels and pushing the geometry is not very hard in comparison.

The proper way to author textures is to author the art at 2x the texture resolution (and have fine enough details to use that resolution to the fullest) and then downscale to texture resolution.

What we are getting in our console ports (90+% of PC sales by USD) is often either the original texture used for authoring the texture on consoles, or a resolution higher than the authoring resolution, and definitely higher than the fine detail resolution of the art.

 

[Hdgamer]

So would there be a true benifit in designing uncompressed textures if the vram was greater and could use it? I know skyrim uses uncompressed textures in some mods, but is uncompressed vs compressed display a huge difference even at higher resolutions?

 

[Stuka87]

3GB is fine for now. More is better for the future. But only cards out today that may see a real issue with VRAM in the future will be an R9 290/290X, and the 780Ti. Most other cards are not fast enough to really utilize more than 3GB of VRAM, with some fringe case exceptions (Ultra high resolution texture packs and such).

 

[24601]

So would there be a true benifit in designing uncompressed textures if the vram was greater and could use it? I know skyrim uses uncompressed textures in some mods, but is uncompressed vs compressed display a huge difference even at higher resolutions?

The modern texture compression format(s) used in DX11 has very slight degradation of image quality vs uncompressed source.

The problem nowadays (in the high end PC space) is mostly that the source itself is just not very detailed in comparison with the target texture resolution.

Crysis 3 is the only game so far to have saturated the detail level of the textures for use in 1080p.

Most games nowadays make up for the lack of actual detail in their textures and geometry with a crapton of photoshop filters on the scene/image (this includes blur filters and depth of field blur filters).

 

[Anarchist420]

So would there be a true benifit in designing uncompressed textures if the vram was greater and could use it? I know skyrim uses uncompressed textures in some mods, but is uncompressed vs compressed display a huge difference even at higher resolutions?

yes, there would be a huge benefit because uncompressed textures don't have compression artifacts. Lossy compression sucks and I wish it had never been invented.