Nvidia rumored to release their GTX 1080 GPU in May

[Damien c]

Does it not make sense to use all available VRAM? Why would you buy a flagship card if you wanted efficient usage? We want games to be scalable.

To be honest if they were using the ram efficiently for all resolutions etc then we wouldn't in my opinion need such large amounts of Vram.

I am not a game dev so I don't understand whether it is down to lazy coding from the game devs or the game engines being poor, but what I don't understand is how games like Crysis can use less Vram whilst delivering better visuals and performance than, the likes of Call Of Duty, Titanfall and many more games.

I just find it annoying that games are coming out, that are ported potentially from the consoles version and they run worse on the pc than they do on the consoles, which iirc are using the same API's now as the pc and also some times use the hardware of the pc and look identical in terms of looks, but offer slightly better performance and draw distance.

Gears Of War Ultimate, to me is a perfect example of this in that from the videos I have seen it does not look any better on the pc compared to the graphics I have seen on the Xbox One, but it performed worse on the PC and whilst it now may perform better on the pc, there is no graphical improvements.

One of the main reasons I play games on the PC is for better visuals, performance and control input, but given the performance of games recently and the way they don't really look better if at all, I often wonder why I buy certain games on the pc any more and instead I wonder if I should just buy them on the Xbox.

Maybe it's just me expecting to much from developers when it comes to games at 4K, but at the moment I really only play Elite Dangerous and Minecraft on the PC, but I play Destiny, Call Of Duty, Titanfall, Halo, Gears Of War and many more on the Xbox.

 

[SPS]

To be honest if they were using the ram efficiently for all resolutions etc then we wouldn't in my opinion need such large amounts of Vram.

I am not a game dev so I don't understand whether it is down to lazy coding from the game devs or the game engines being poor, but what I don't understand is how games like Crysis can use less Vram whilst delivering better visuals and performance than, the likes of Call Of Duty, Titanfall and many more games.

Putting visual quality to one side for a moment. Say as a developer I target a particular visual design and PC GPUs with at least 2GB VRAM. Now my visual design requires use of x amount of textures when they are all on the GPU it can take up 1.5GB. I also have lots of models which can take up to 2GB on the GPU. Oh and I also have lots of other GPU resources for various rendering techniques such as temporal AA that take space.

It's clear there isn't enough space to target the 2GB graphics cards. I need to implement texture and geometry streaming. I'll give the streaming system 1.5GB of VRAM to work with as a pool. That's great it now all runs smoothly, but I can't necessarily load the highest detail texture instantly because of streaming speeds, so I may load a lower res version first to avoid obvious popping.

Now for my 980ti users they easily have enough space for me to stick everything on the GPU so it doesn't make sense to just give it 1.5GB, I'll scale it so the system always uses 75% of VRAM for my streaming pool. On a 980ti 6GB we may not have to stream anything so you'll get the most optimal visuals at all times, success.

 

[jimma47]

Nice insights into dev world SPS - thanks

 

[Damien c]

Putting visual quality to one side for a moment. Say as a developer I target a particular visual design and PC GPUs with at least 2GB VRAM. Now for my visual design requires use of x amount of textures when they are all on the GPU it can take up 1.5GB. I also have lots of models which can take up to 2GB on the GPU. Oh and I also have lots of other GPU resources for various rendering techniques such as temporal AA that take space.

It's clear there isn't enough space to target the 2GB graphics cards. I need to implement texture and geometry streaming. I'll give the streaming system 1.5GB of VRAM to work with as a pool. That's great it now all runs smoothly, but I can't necessarily load the highest detail texture instantly because of streaming speeds, so I may load a lower res version first to avoid obvious popping.

Now for my 980ti users they easily have enough space for me to stick everything on the GPU so it doesn't make sense to just give it 1.5GB, I'll scale it so the system always uses 75% of VRAM for my streaming pool. On a 980ti 6GB we may not have to stream anything so you'll get the most optimal visuals at all times, success.

Ok that makes sense thanks.