Here's some testing I just did to prove that people need to be more conservative with the game settings.. (god im good to you lot sometimes.. this took me best part of 3 hrs)

All testing done at 1920x1080 Rez

Firstly lets have a look at what happens if you have anything that hasnt cleared out of memory properly when you start the game.

Desktop Memory 760MB (normally sits at about 240-300MB for me)
This is with the last official Retail patch and at Maximum settings 2xAA.
Notice before we even start that we are WELL above 1.5GB Vram and it gets worse.. even 2GB Vram cards couldnt run well as it peaks at 2.26GB Vram.
http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/...max-Retail.jpg


Next up... Latest Retail Patch Max Settings without the desktop memory hog.
Desktop Memory 300MB
Starts at 1.4GB and climbs to 1.87GB Vram...
Still too much for 1GB and 1.5GB cards.
http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/...Max-Retail.jpg

Ok lets switch over to the current Beta.
Again Max Settings 2xAA.
Desktop again down at 240MB Vram
Starts at 1.3GB and climbs to 1.6GB Vram.
Again too much for 1GB and 1.5GB cards. Notice how the texture management is actually working though. (its not just a constant increase and flatline like above) This is one area the Devs look to have been working. And this used to be a lot worse with the original game when it 1st released right up to until they rewrote the core graphics code for the current retail patch.
http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/...Max-latest.jpg

Ok so now on to High settings...
Latest Beta High Preset 2xAA
Desktop at 330MB
Start at 1.38GB and peaks at 1.6GB but stays mostly just under or just over 1.5GB.
Hurray we have found the sweet spot settings for 1.5GB cards.
http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/...igh-Latest.jpg

Last test... Medium Preset 2xAA
Desktop 260MB
Starts at 880MB looking good.. Peaks at about 1.1GB but mostly stays around 1GB Vram... Again another mystery solved... 1GB video cards should stick to Medium preset for best results.
http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/...ium-Latest.jpg

What have we learnt here today???
MOST people are just trying to run the game with too many features up too high and they are running out of video card memory which means the game has to swap textures from system ram and back and forth to video ram. THIS is what causes major hickups and most of the stuttering. It gets even worse if it has to go to HDD for it.

So...
1GB video cards use Medium Preset...
and slowly turn up a few settings until you notice stuttering.
1.5GB cards use High Preset...
and slowly turn up a few settings until you notice stuttering.
2GB+ Video cards use Very high (max)..
you may still notice occasional stuttering because you will sometimes still run out of Vram unless you have 2.5GB or more.

Thanx Mucho Phat:grin:

That was indeed, a labor of love.

It makes a lot of sense to me.

I still have much trouble with my 2.5 gig of vram.
Stutters and slow downs.

Given my system specs? CPU?
What would you suggest for settings?

Thanks for the research Phat!

Hopefully some people will realize that original textures are huge and maybe they should drop them down a notch (but probably not.... ;))

FS Phat,

You post should be a stand-alone locked thread.
It's immensely informative.

Good test, but I would not completely agree with your conclusions.
I red some answers from BF3 developer about VRAM usage (I don't play that)
and he was saying that 1.5 GB of VRAM is enough everything maxed out, high AA and AF at 1980 resolution.He mentioned if there is more availeble VRAM driver will load some more stuff that is not realy needed.
Sorry I don't have link, conversation was from twitter on some web page.

I'm not shure if it is the same with CloD, but I'm using 1 GB card almoust everything maxed out (trees low, building details medium) at 1680 res.
No stutters, with lot of planes arround shootin at me ), high or low,lot of flak arrround.On 1980 resolution only 5-10 FPS less.

Wish people would stop comparing BF3 to COD.. They are completely different.
The maps for BF3 are like what... 5Km's Sq maximum. The maps for COD are 100 x bigger, there's more variety of models and equipment, there's more physics computations and all the intricate internal structures of the models also take up texture memory. When you add Antialiasing on top you quickly run out of Vram in COD. BF3 runs in well under 1GB Vram quite nicely for this reason there's just not that much to model so the textures can still be high quality and fit easily.

Thanks Phat, that was necessary as noone believe the guys, who already told them all these problems.

Bf3 is not only, because the maps are smaller, but also the viewing distance, which is just about 1km or 2 and not 20 km. The textures in bf3 are quite demanding or better say the amount of polygons is high. But this is more gpu dependant

Second fact for bf and all the othe fps graphic monsters:
1.) many things are just eye candy. The graphic behind the game and the technique is less demanding. I prefer all games with less effects, because it is better playable. Your eyes in reality could focus quickly and sitting in front of bf3 seems cool, but a computer game should focus on the circumstances of seeing things on screen. E.g. the general viewing in counterstrike without all the effects suites way better to reality and makes the game a competitive "skill" game. Bf3 is just eye candy for casual gamer and will not survive this long! My opinion..
2.) The developer first built up most games for multi platform. And as ps3 and xbox360 has very low ram overall, it needs to be done like that. On PC you only have problems with these games, as they are not 100% suitable for pc and not programmed well. Normally, the hardware of a pc will simply be bored to death by these games. That is the influence of the casual gaming comunity. As more and more casual gamers are becoming real gamers, they will soon ask for more challenging games with longer life span. Think of some games losing their support after 1 year... No online servers and no possibilty to play it online anymore, because dedicated servers seem to be out of scope nowadays.

Hopefully everyone understands, that bf3 is graphically demanding because of bad programming, although the frostbyte engine is an engine, which scales quite good. That is, why the game for pc is looking very good. But all in all it is simply not totally optimized for pc. The engine in this case is some kind of "conversion" tool to have a multiplatform engine, easy to run on every hardware.

Thanks again phat to show some guys some pictures to get heard. ;)