Currently running a Ryzen 2600 and AMD 6700XT, older cpu with mid tier gpu. This is my round up of 2023 gaming
Installed Dead Space remake on gamepass, stutters everywhere, apparently not limited to older hardware. Played Resident Evil 4 Remake instead, fantastic reimagining of the original, super tight controls, darker tone, less annoying Ashley. Platinumed it on Steam.
Remnant 2 went on sale, got it, textures were weirdly smeared, FPS was low, Played Lies of P instead running on UE4 instead of UE5, caught off guard by how good the combat, story and music was.
Got Wo Long, felt like playing with glue, refunded, went for an older Team Ninja game** Final Fantasy Origin: Strangers of Paradise** not a fantastic game, but good for chilling with, pick up and play, run a few builds, crush chaos, felt the typical Team Ninja slow motion during busy fights.
Wanted to play Jedi Survivor or Starfield, heard about PC problems, played Like a Dragon: Man who Erased his Name instead, small side story, essentially the penultimate chapter of Kiryu's story, nothing new was added, story was great.
Hogwarts Legacy, ran terrible, boring gameplay. Hi Fi Rush, ran great, fun rhythm based combat. Cocoon, mild performance issues, but otherwise excellent puzzle game with mind bending twists.
All in all, it seems that games built on older engines still looked comparable to new gen games, but ran better. I imagine that once developers get the hang of things, the performance may improve. Capcom is great at PC now and EA still sucks. Indie games greatly depended if studios knew how to scope their project and play to their strengths.
I see... But why the dependency on vram?
Also, regarding the graphics: Tomb Raider is a huge game with large maps and heavy graphics. Ran fine.
Deliver us Mars is an Unreal Engine game made by a relatively small studio.
I feel like Unreal is to blame for this... Idk if I'm right tho.
Unreal engine is pretty bad for open maps. It generates a lot of cpu usage when changing zones. And heavy textures and other heavy elements don't enhance the experience.
The vram, I'm not sure what your questions is about.
The vram is special ram (much higher bandwidth, but slightly higher latency than cpu ram, also supports special extra things) included on the board of the graphics card.
It is necessary because it stores textures and others game elements the graphics card needs to operate the game (shadow info,...). The elements are loaded into vram, from the very slow (in comparison) drive (even nvme 5.0 ssds are extra slow compared to vram or ram) to allow the gpu to process whatever it has to do. Background tasks, windows, the desktop... Also use vram to be able to have the app windows and desktop displayed, so the total available for the game can vary.
If there isn't enough vram, there can be multiple things happening (I'm talking about textures but vram includes others things too) :
Resizable bar ( or SAM on amd) is not enabled : the gpu will not be able to load all the textures, so it would either have missing textures, or lag a lot due to texture swapping. The textures can also take a lot of time to load instead of completely missing depending on the game optimisation, due to swapping with previous textures. The game can even crash.
Resizable bar is enabled : it is possible with this pci-e configuration for the gpu to access system memory. So in some cases, textures may spill into system memory (cpu ram), which isn't great either, because system memory has a way higher latency to the gpu (it has to go through the cpu, pci-e slot...), and way lower bandwidth. And so generates lots of lag.
If a game is well optimized, the lower the settings are the lower vram usage there is. Some games however did not have such great optimisation. Vram usage mostly depends on the texture quality and resolution. (increasing the texture quality will use a very few/negligible amount of extra gpu power, but increase the vram usage).
There is also a baseline the devs may put for optimisation. The less vram there is, the less the textures can have data available to use. So the more compromises have to be done, with less and less quality. So fixing a baseline quality depending on the current most used vram capacity is not that bad. Tho it does have issues for people having less available.
Damn. You just can't win, can you? ๐