Quote:Original post by XaosII
Im bringing this up since i like to play some of my games in windowed mode, and have something else up on a second monitor. But with the game taking up so much memory, it tends to make the other application slow too.
Quote:Original post by XaosII
Im bringing this up since i like to play some of my games in windowed mode, and have something else up on a second monitor. But with the game taking up so much memory, it tends to make the other application slow too. Yeah i know im not really helping reduce memory usage :P and i certainly cant do something like that on a console....but its still a bit baffling why they dont purposefully create tighter memory controls.
Quote:Original post by XaosII
Thanks for all your responses guys, though im a bit disappointed that the truth of the answer is "we do it cuz we can" from the point of developers. I mean, inst that purposely hurting the game's scalability for lower systems?
Im aware of the argument that its cheap to upgrade ram, but with how RAM hungry these games are (relative to the forced restrictions on a console) having only 1GB of memory, but a $200+ video card would still yield fairly poor performance. Probably smooth framerates when still, but stuttering while moving (and loading assets into view). It only makes the task of upgrading more expensive and confusing for a person not so tech savvy.
Are the semi-small gains (for a good chunk of titles) from the additional use of memory for a PC-console title worth it for PC gamers when they take up twice the amount?
Im bringing this up since i like to play some of my games in windowed mode, and have something else up on a second monitor. But with the game taking up so much memory, it tends to make the other application slow too. Yeah i know im not really helping reduce memory usage :P and i certainly cant do something like that on a console....but its still a bit baffling why they dont purposefully create tighter memory controls.
Quote:Original post by XaosIIIt's not "we use a lot of memory because we can" but instead "we don't optimise because we don't need to". The people who buy games are the people who have decent PCs and so optimisation of this type doesn't get many more sales. That makes it a premature optimisation, and we don't do those.
Thanks for all your responses guys, though im a bit disappointed that the truth of the answer is "we do it cuz we can" from the point of developers. I mean, inst that purposely hurting the game's scalability for lower systems?
Quote:What exactly is taking up all that memory compared to the same title on a console? Can PC game developers actually be much more resourceful?
Quote:Original post by Promit
Well, look at it this way.
A reasonable working set for graphics data nowadays is anywhere in the realm of 384 MB and up, depending on your hardware target. That's data which is currently live in some sort of surface or buffer. From that, it's reasonable to say that at least 256 MB is backed data -- it exists in video and system memory, for events like device lost. (Notice that this data will probably be paged out.)
That's the first 256 MB of missing memory.
Quote:Original post by YsaneyaUnder D3D, D3DPOOL_DEFAULT surfaces are not backed up (permanently) in system memory. Yes, while you lock one of those surfaces to write to it you're using system memory, but that's a temporary block that is discarded once you unlock it and it's finished being uploaded to video memory.
It's worse than that.. all data is backed up in system memory, not only data in use in video memory.
Quote:Original post by slayemin
A low poly model has fewer points to keep track of then a high poly model so its ram footprint is smaller.
