Okay. At least now we are getting to my point.
How do we calculate how much vram a given GPU can actually make use of?
Anyone care to hazard even a guess? No one has answered what I thought was a rather simple question.
I kinda did answer this. It's pretty simple. You have a GPU with a certain amount of processing power, you take a bunch of games, you load them up, you keep cranking the games visual setting up, which increases demand on vRAM and also lowers your frame rate. You keep doing this and benching until you're into unplyable frame rate territory, and then you look at what vRAM usage you're at. You do that across a bunch of different games. You pick some sensible average and that's that.
And then all the people can say, hey but I can load up this game such that it's using more vRAM, and sure you can, but you don't have playable frame rates, so no one cares.
You must acknowledge a problem with your logic, here.
First you tell me those things aren't necessary*, then when I remove them from the system you say the system is "crippled." (*fast sys ram, fast NVME).
You are trying to argue both ways at the same time.
So basically, if you have less VRAM (and you want software to try to compensate for missing hardware) then you need those other bits of hardware. Fast NVME and fast + plentiful sys RAM.
That's just a true fact, they're not necessary for the technique of swapping items in and out of vRAM, people have been using slower disks for that for years on open world game engines and it's not a problem at all, just go and play an open world game running off an SATA disk...surely you've done that in the past at some point? How is this controversial and subject of debate? The reason I said you crippled the PC specs is because you shot for something with a small amount of system RAM and that's needed for all sorts of things, the OS, the game itself, any other apps you're running. That would cripple the performance of a game for reasons other than those related to vRAM fetching, and in fact most assets do not go through system RAM to get to vRAM, it's straight from disk to vRAM. Most games will just tell you what the recommended amount of system RAM you need for the game to run and it's typically 16Gb these days, for a fancy high spec AAA game.
With some possible exceptions to that, I think that the idTech5+ engine might actually borrow system RAM because it has an extremely sophisticated version of texture caching which allows it to use like >300Gb of worth of textures. And that's a microcosm of discussion all on it's own because they do some very clever things to make that work, and they largely did that because they wanted to get this super large texture game onto the consoles that without those innovations wouldn't be playable. That likely has a big impact on the consoles moves towards far quicker storage devices because it works really well and you want to leverage those systems as much as humanly possible especially if you're running middle or the road hardware for like 6 years.
The point is we've been doing this for a long time already, it doesn't require super fast storage but you can do the same trick better with faster storage and that's what is probably going to be big in this next generation with the consoles taking the lead and gearing up their hardware deliberately to support it.
