Why GFX card with more RAM?

[FS~Phat]

Originally Posted by Tree_UK

In truth though phat, the dev's did tell us that it would run perfectly well on low/medium spec PC's. Luthier always said that all is screen shots/video's were done on a poor quality PC, I even offered to build him a top spec PC so he could show us images with FSAA on because at the time he said his PC wasn't powerful enough to show FSAA, I also said a better spec PC would allow him to show video's with 'true' in game footage. The offer was declined.

Yes we all know that.. Im only speculating here, but somewhere along the line something significant changed in the game engine development, maybe it was the switch from opengl to directx to enable support across more platforms for the game engine? Oleg was quite disappointed about having to make this change so late in the development. That combined with other changes like the anti-epilepsy definitely broke something. Im sure with time it will be fixed though.

Remember how good the promo videos looked with AA working too? Im pretty confident they will get back to that, the quality is in there, they just have to tweak it to get it back.

Originally Posted by Oleg Maddox

Yes. Unfortunately.
And this is done also becasue of future possible portings. It is more easy from DX...
However to make better is still better in OpenGl... even it is harder now. But the life dictate us DX...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPTYO...6&feature=plcp

BTW I can play it just fine with 1 or 2 of my 1.5GB GTX 580s running at 50FPS+ without any driver tweaks, but I need to run in split frame rendering at a lower frame rate with tri or quad SLI running to keep it smooth. With settings on Ultra I can still play in surround mode 6040x1080 with AA off and I only have 1.5GB cards. More GPU memory helps but its not the whole story, the graphics engine still needs major work and hopefully the next patch that Luthier mentioned will be the main fix we've all been waiting for.

[Ataros]

Originally Posted by Tree_UK

In truth though phat, the dev's did tell us that it would run perfectly well on low/medium spec PC's.

Never happened. Sorry.

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I do not report it. Just for your information.

[FS~Phat]

Originally Posted by Ataros

Never happened. Sorry.

I do not report it. Just for your information.

Yes perhaps Tree should have said "...would run perfectly well on low/medium spec PC's at lower quality settings."

It was never promised to run max quality on midrange rigs. In fact it was quite the opposite, saying it would take a few years for the hardware to catch up and be able to turn all the features on.

[FS~Phat]

Here's some more info from Oleg's old ready room.
For those that have never read it, its long but a worthwhile read that gives you some insight into the plans and difficulties in achieving what has been done with CoD.

Here's one of my favourite quotes from one of Olegs responses to questions.

"For us is a great task how to make a lot of details and at the same time to render a lot of aircraft in air simultaniosly.... So all things will be optimized for this...
Say it is possible to make even greater details of damage, aircraft itself , etc... but probably in case of hundreds aircraft in action around you you will need the PC that will be existed only say ten years after release
Hope you all understand what the tasks we have and what the technical problems are on our board...
The is no problem to make increadible amount of polygons in aircraft (or ground units), but then will follow problem of PC power, when in air isn't just one aircraft.... When the water is trasparent, when the clouds looks like real and moving, etc...
BoB will be again a "fight of compromises" in technologies and will offer the best compromises that wioll be usable for many years ahead, like it was with Il-2"

From Q64> http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=6909

[Buchon]

Back to the topic ...

I did not measured but I think that the game on high settings uses more than 1 GB over cities and low altitude terrain (1920x1200), over the channel there no problems on high.

BF3 uses more than 1 GB on high settings over 1920x1080 for example, 1GB is a past thing on high level gaming, today mid range cards packets 1.5 GB usually and top end cards pack even 3 GB on a single GPU as the ATI 7970.

[FS~Phat]

Originally Posted by Buchon

Back to the topic ...

I did not measured but I think that the game on high settings uses more than 1 GB over cities and low altitude terrain (1920x1200), over the channel there no problems on high.

BF3 uses more than 1 GB on high settings over 1920x1080 for example, 1GB is a past thing on high level gaming, today mid range cards packets 1.5 GB usually and top end cards pack even 3 GB on a single GPU as the ATI 7970.

Yes it uses the full 1.5GB in my cards a lot of the time at 1920x1080 with all details on max. Not all the time though, sometimes it hovers around 1.2, 1.3GB.

[SEE]

Great post FS_Phat, thanks for keeping and posting those comments and reminding us all of the technical challenges this sim imposed!

One more question, what is the relationship between the GFX card and the CPU with regards 'bottlenecking'? Is this simply a GFX card whose performance outclasses the CPU and thus has to wait for X amount of CPU cycles and seen as stutters, drop in FPS etc and why the use four cores should have a major advantage of say two?

[FS~Phat]

Originally Posted by SEE

Great post FS_Phat, thanks for keeping and posting those comments and reminding us all of the technical challenges this sim imposed!

One more question, what is the relationship between the GFX card and the CPU with regards 'bottlenecking'? Is this simply a GFX card whose performance outclasses the CPU and thus has to wait for X amount of CPU cycles and seen as stutters, drop in FPS etc and why the use four cores should have a major advantage of say two?

Forgive me if im a little out on this as your testing the limits of my knowledge here.. but i believe the CPU determines how fast polygons and triangles co-ordinates are calculated and the GPU renders the scene when all co-ordinates are complete for each frame. So for complex scenes with many polygons and triangles the CPU is very important.

I believe that currently the 3d rendering engine in the game is not running on separate cores yet so occasionally it hitches/stutters while it waits for the cpu core to complete some other instructions before it gets back to computing the polygon co-ordinates for the next frame.

When they move rendering to a dedicated core (or even split it over 2 cores) I believe most of the stutter issues will be gone. A lot of work has already gone into streamlining the rendering pipeline since the first release which is why stutters are all but eliminated in the current version. IT WILL only get better over time. Maybe they wont get it 100% first go with the next big change but they will keep working on it as its a very complex issue to spread the load across multiple cores and still keep the game fluid and everything in the game world in sync with each frame. 1 or 2 cores just isnt enough CPU power for everything that has to be calculated in this game, and more than 2 cores is harder to get everything running smoothly and in sync. Add SLI or Crossfire to the equation and its even harder again!

PS. This is why 4way SLI on my rig runs smooth as silk in split frame rendering mode because the scene is split into 4 smaller windows with less polygons per GPU to handle and no stutter in the rendering pipleline waiting for each frame to be rendered as all 4 GPUs render to the same frame at the same time. This also splits the load a little more over the CPU cores because Nvidia drivers are multi-threaded.
SLI Split frame rendering is smoother than a single card and way way way smoother than SLI alternate frame rendering, especially when 4GPUs are involved.

Forgive me for any inaccuracies, im just a sales guy working in IT with enough knowledge to be dangerous!

[Ataros]

Originally Posted by SEE

One more question, what is the relationship between the GFX card and the CPU with regards 'bottlenecking'? Is this simply a GFX card whose performance outclasses the CPU and thus has to wait for X amount of CPU cycles and seen as stutters, drop in FPS etc and why the use four cores should have a major advantage of say two?

CPU has to provide enough data for GPU to work with. It can be a problem if CPU has to calculate AI of many aircraft or ground vehicles.

I had stutters both online and offline with stock speed of my CPU (2.8 Ghz) and happy to run it on 3.8Ghz online or offline with about 30-40 AI around. I guess if you can take a dual-core to 4.5Ghz+ it may be sufficient not to bottleneck gtx560 but sometimes a 3rd core may be needed to avoid stutter or fps drop. I think no one did much testing on this. You can check out results of some benchmarks of many various systems here http://translate.google.com/translat...hp%3Ft%3D68723
Easy to understand and make conclusions.

[NervousEnergy]

I haven't seen any comment in the thread about texture size. IIRC, the game defaults to 'original' texture size, which are enormous uncompressed images. Reducing these to 'medium' will have a profound impact on the amount of VRAM used to run the game.

It's a minor thing, but the devs should have the game default to medium textures instead of original, if they haven't already. A lot of folks may never touch this setting, and with a 1 GB card they'd have to set the resolution really low to avoid thrashing.