VRAM and PC ports

[Guest]

So this is a discussion topic.

 

I've noticed lately that a lot of PC ports seem to be heavily utilizing system RAM and VRAM. This makes sense, textures are only going to get bigger and more detailed.

 

What I'm wondering, is how much this has to do with the consoles. Both consoles have 8 GB of shared RAM which I know you can't compare directly to PC architecture, but I suspect is affecting the way PC ports of console games are preforming and what specs they require. 

 

One of my biggest examples of this is Assassins Creed Unity. Many would make the argument that this game is poorly optimized for PC - and they wouldn't be wrong. I think there is something worth noticing in the way this game runs however, GPU's with high VRAM and high VRAM bandwidth seem to run better on it. Assassins Creed Syndicate seems to follow a similar trend, supposedly requiring 3 GB of VRAM in order to achieve HD resolution but only requiring the processing power of a GTX 760. Makes me wonder how the 960 with it's 128 bit bus will even fair against this game. 

 

Other games such as GTAV and Battlefront also seem to be fairly RAM heavy.

 

The question is, are we seeing a trend of PC games being designed for the hardware configuration of the consoles and not really making use of the advancements in the core efficiency of GPU's?

 

We've all seen benchmarks of Radeon cards doing really well lately, again utilizing high amounts of VRAM and high memory bandwidth. Is it possible that we're looking at a future of PC games (most of which designed first to work well on consoles) where this is what matters most?

 

I have no idea if these theories hold any weight, so I'd like to hear your thoughts.