Well, there's no harm in checking things out.

Since we're talking about VRAM....

With the HD pack installed the game is finally using my 1gb VRAM completely (according to msi afterburner) but... no fps loss, no much more stuttering than usual, nothing strange happens!! Is it "normal"?

I expected the gfx to melt, the cpu to explode and myself to get killed by a fireball that once was my pc.. but no...

High resolution textures eating performance is a myth. It's not been an issue really since S3 introduced S3 Texture Compression and then Microsoft brought it and named it DirectX texture Compression. S3 showcased a demo running 1024x1024 size textures over a decade ago on 32Mb of VRAM.

Makes sense.

If using high res textures, or increasing draw distances, or anything else increases the amount of VRAM used close to the amount physically available, that can have a dramatic impact on perceived performance.

Yes but people think high resolution textures will kill performance even if you have the VRAM. As long as you have the VRAM and RAM, there should be no performance hit using such large textures. Unreal Tournament back in 1999 came with an extra disk with 500MB worth of high resolution textures that would put some of today's textures to shame.

Thanks for the replies guys!

Well I get some more stuttering while sprinting/riding horse, but fps is 60 rock solid.. with VRAM usage 1010mb Well maybe I'm just lucky

While partially true.... High resolution textures do not effect performance at all UNLESS vram is exhausted and it start having to swap like mad to try and keep up.. but usually when this happens with modern systems, you experiencing hitching or complete lack of FPS (dropping down to sub 10fps for example from 30-60 average).

Originally when demonstrating 1024x1024 S3 Textures, there demo wasn't using an excessive amount of them like we see today. For example in the unreal Tournament game, where S3 textures were first introduced in a HUGE game of the year release and only available via the GOTY eddition, and then only initially supported through using "tricks" and some hacking later to get running on later video cards that supported DXTC1 and newer..... there was a limited amout of texture required.... dxtc1 allowed for essentially 1024x1024 textures to consume the same amount as the standard maximum 256x256 textures that were being used for numerous years.

Actually i have the GOTY eddition of UT installed and running with both the S3 pack and additional "hd" textures that can be found to further replace more of the textures not covered by the official s3 pack.


BAD... DO NOT TOUCH THIS value... the max allocated memory bytes solution was a modifiable value in oblivion and an argueable one that.... it was never intended to have a value that exceeded the 32bit limits let alone sat on that, it actually can increase CTDs or issues due to allocating memory it doesn't need at all.... with it removed it should automatically adjust depending on the requirements needed. Most likely the fuction doesn't do anything, but there are confused/mixed reports of it working/not working. If you feel you must have something don't exeed 1.8gb at most.... personally i run without it after having toyed with it for a few hours at different sizes and found without it was just better.

No its not a placebo effect, anyone who isn't too lazy to click a few buttons and download a program can see this for themselves.

It is as easy as reading it though, VRAM has addressable space just like any other form of storage. If texture data or framebuffer data is occupying those addresses in the video card's memory, it needs to be flushed out of VRAM before new texture data is loaded. If you have free addressable space, you can move data to VRAM over the PCIe bus, then flush data without waiting. If you are maxed or close to max on VRAM, the graphics card needs to flush VRAM first before it loads new data, which can cause the kind of hitching/stuttering often complained about. If you don't have enough VRAM to cache all textures before they're needed, you're going to be flushing/caching textures far more often and also more susceptible to momentary drops in FPS as textures are loaded from disk to system RAM to VRAM.

But yes if you open a lot of windows and run Skyrim its very easy to see, you start with more VRAM used by roughly the same amount over your normal VRAM usage before you start Skyrim.

i'm finding windows and many vram reading programs are reporting vram usage incorrectly on crossfire/sli systems....

While i don't have BF3 on this machine currently.. i loaded up a few other programs to see how aero effected them, all produced the same results with aero vram usage being unloaded completely as the games went full screen.

Yes exactly, there is a very slight hit in performance if you have 16xAF/HQ AF modes enabled from the additional filtering. But with modern video cards with such high bandwidth and PCIe bus speeds, you may only see stuttery movement or lack of smooth panning when you hit a VRAM wall instead of a complete drop in FPS. If you have crazy levels of SSAA also then its more likely for framerates to drop into the single digits or teens as every frame is dependent on VRAM being cleared.

GeForce.com does a comparison of performance with different texture quality for Skyrim and its pretty much the same and in-line with every other game. http://www.geforce.com/Optimize/Guides/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweak-guide

We're on the same wave length here.

I suspect that many of the people having performance / stability issues with the high-res texture pack are suffering from either VRAM shortage or else a general lack of system resources; I doubt that a texture pack can - in itself - cause code errors!

nope.... textures cannot cause code errors unless physical resources are stretched thin and they are fighting over each other.

You are

And to state the rather obvious, I can confirm that a 512mb card is not enough to run the high res textures at 1920x1080 with 4xadAA and 8xAF The only difference being the high res textures.

No stability issues mind you, just sluggish frame rates and a regular hitching as it pages.

Hmmm...what about the Pre-Rendered Frames setting in nVidia control panel? The default is 3. Would lowering or raising this impact VRAM and possibly smooth out stuttering for some? The HD pack runs fine on my card (GTX560 1GB) so far so I don't need to fiddle with it. Just curious if it would have an effect though.

Lowering this should free up some VRAM, however, it will only free up the amount of memory one frame takes up, i.e. not very much. Worth a try though if you're sitting near the limits of your VRAM.

On the subject, I'm running GTX460 786MB in SLi, and am having trouble with the high res texture pack.

I've maxed out every box/slider in the settings plus a few .ini tweaks, uGrids=7, and am using 2xMSAA and 16xAF (high quality through nVidia control panel). When I switch on the texture pack I get brief stuttering when turning around quickly and entering new areas. Since I refuse to lower any of the settings, I have concluded that 786MB of VRAM is not enough for the texture pack. I will make sure to get 2GB graphics cards next time I upgrade! But for now, sadly I will have to go back to the original textures.

If you're experiencing stuttering issues and using 16xAF, you can also reduce memory usage by lowering AF to 8x. I got a notable performance increase with this trick, and the quality difference is not that huge in my opinion. I'm not suggesting Manehead should do this, just a tip to those wanting to sacrifice some image quality for performance.

Or you could just revert back to uGrids = 5 and have no problems using the HD textures.

Yes, I could, but it's a choice of either seeing more of the world or seeing less of the world but slightly sharper. I choose the former.

However, I will try lowering af to 8x, but I fear that even if I switch af + aa off completely it will not be enough to overcome my VRAM shortcomings.

Quite possible, because lowering AF is only of any help when you're on the brink of running out of memory. Furthermore, the impact will vary from situation to situation.

Also, if you're using user made texture mods, have you gone through the textures to make sure all of them are of sensible size? DDSopt is a great tool when optimising textures.

I ended up extracting the HD texture files and handpicking the textures I consider to have some impact in general gameplay in order to keep VRAM in check.

Another possible option, is to keep FXAA/AF 16x and reduce AA to 2x. You can also just disable AA, as FXAA seems to be doing a very good job -at least on 1080p. You won't get entirely rid of the hickups in heavy areas, but it should make them much more tolerable.

FXAA => blurry image => no point in using high resolution textures.

Sorry that's not at all accurate. You do get some blurring but the textures are still much more detailed using the high-res textures. Also, FXAA (and any other form of FSAA) can actually help reduce the texture aliasing/shimmering in movement caused by very fine details in high-res textures since MSAA/TAA dont' touch them at all.

At *very* high screen resolutions you'd be right, but given that the point of this thread is help reduce VRAM usage...


Some kinds of shimmer can be reduced by FXAA, other kinds of shimmer are actually made worse by FXAA. FXAA is a post processing effect, and one that doesn't use any information from additional buffers (such as the depth buffer). Such a PP effect cannot add any information to an image, it can only take information away.