Why GFX card with more RAM?

[Codex]

Originally Posted by icarus

Except I have not ever seen any games use over 2 gb vram even at 2650 x 1600 res with AA at 16x super and I have seen Cod use well over 2 Gb with no AA or AF. That seems exceptional to me.

There are a few reasons why I think this may the case. Mind you I'm only speculating here:

1) I believe the code base of CoD lives in the managed world, i.e. .NET and it makes unmanaged function calls to the DX API to render the graphics. This style of programming model is inherently a more memory intensive operation and slower (only slightly) as there's lots of storing of memory heaps and stacks and buffers going on. But it means more manageable code, no need to worry about memory leaks as much as unmanaged code and easier to update / modify.

2) We're dealing with a flight simulation that needs to create a land mass which is not only accurate but vast as seen from the sky, this means more memory is needed than the average game to store the environment. On top of all that, you have textures and buffers (pixel, vertex, shaders etc.), and 3D models with a higher than average poly count.

3) Optimization. I don't think CoD is properly optimized, hence why it's going through a complete rewrite at the moment.