CoD IW High VRAM usage, justified?

[Princess Luna]

This is a quick "log" from playing a mission in CoD IW Campaign, I noticed that even playing on 2560x1080p all graphical options on max keeping steady 75hz with v-sync this game is not exactly demanding, my GPU and CPU are very far from being max out in their loads and it fluctuates a lot as you can see here, understandable since the game uses an old engine and the graphics though very good are not the most stunning ever... any ways what surprises me here is the high usage of VRAM as you can see there, having it reached up to 10gb at some point and being most of the time stable on 9027mb.

 

I honestly can not see how can this game eat up so much VRAM especially in a considerably low resolution for today's standards, is this a case of bad porting on this matter? because the game itself as shown isn't too demanding, but its usage of vram shows it is quite unbalanced in its requirements, a GTX 1060 3gb should be capable of playing this game on maximum at 1080p however it might get bottlenecked by vram, have anyone in here with a 8gb vram card or lower faced issues with this game due to it?

 

How to justify this amount of vram being used?

[EPPHO]

Depends on what filters do you use,some of them use lot of vRAM

[Droidbot]

COD. Going down the shitter since 2013

[Princess Luna]

3 minutes ago, Droidbot said:

COD. Going down the shitter since 2013

I have been playing it the last couple of days, I must say this game in particular could have been an awesome title were Activision more concerned in developing their stories more and increased characters depth and label it as something else other than "Call of Duty".

What I mean is, this game is by no means "bad" the space ship missions are great it reminds me of my favourite part of Star Wars and Star Trek which was the space ship battles, infiltrations and such... Infinity Ward did a great job there, but then again all this sci-fi though good has Nothing to do with what Call of Duty was supposed to be, they used its franchise to boost up a solid idea resulting in just trashing the franchise name and ruining what like I said was a solid idea.

 

The game so far has been a mix of disappointment and some fun time, immersion is impossible on the beginning as they just give you a short crappy video introduction the world and you're already sent to what is the less realistic mission in all of the game so far it seems, but afterwards it starts building up better.

 

Now on the porting side, I find this game terrible, I had to do several troubleshooting before being able to finally play it fine, crashes were constant and most due to memory issues, I normally use  2gb of virtual memory on the HDD which always were fine enough, but just to play this game I need to change to 10gb on the SSD otherwise it WILL crash due to memory issues. Oh the costs of rushing dead lines....

[typographie]

23 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

How to justify this amount of vram being used?

That depends on what happens if you don't have 9 GB available. I mean, if the game actually needs all 9 GB for smooth play, logically the only people who could play it would be those with Titan X's or certain workstation cards. But aside from the usual CoD port concerns there doesn't seem to be a massive outcry about how the game runs on PC.

 

Maybe IW uses a caching system where it just claims whatever VRAM you've got available (or up to some arbitrary amount I guess), whether it needs it for optimal performance or not. Some games do that, since there's usually not much competition for VRAM resources on a gaming system at any given time.

[Princess Luna]

51 minutes ago, typographie said:

That depends on what happens if you don't have 9 GB available. I mean, if the game actually needs all 9 GB for smooth play, logically the only people who could play it would be those with Titan X's or certain workstation cards. But aside from the usual CoD port concerns there doesn't seem to be a massive outcry about how the game runs on PC.

 

Maybe IW uses a caching system where it just claims whatever VRAM you've got available (or up to some arbitrary amount I guess), whether it needs it for optimal performance or not. Some games do that, since there's usually not much competition for VRAM resources on a gaming system at any given time.

Basically it reserves more VRAM it uses because it CAN not because it Needs right? It is true that when you're playing a game unless you have a second monitor playing a movie or something there won't be much VRAM usage from other applications at all so the game can be quite greedy on it.

 

I just got interested on the subject due to the apparent "unbalance" between the over all raw power it requires from the GPU vs the amount of video memory compromised, but I suppose since it is "adjustable" depending on your total amount installed this isn't a major issue to who fire up this game with a 2~3gb vram video card.

 

*edit @Mick Naughty Oh no the game runs smooth as a whistle no issues in performance, it just jumped on my eye like I said because I have hardly ever seen such a high usage of VRAM before and I would never expect it coming from a game like Call of Duty, it feels unbalanced the vram usage vs the gpu usage as a whole, but like mentioned it probably just reserves a lot because it can not because it needs.

[Mick Naughty]

Maybe the setting, a few cods are like this. Bo3, Ghost. Iw is just ghost 2.  If lowering a few settings doesn't lower it or youre not lagging from it I wouldn't worry about it.

[Droidbot]

BO3 loved to eat VRAM. I had a 2GB 770 and it ran like shite, but it ran fine on my friend's 950 4GB. 

[Darkseth]

it's normal. BO3 was like that.

Horrible optimization / Coding. Developers got lazy as fuck ^^

 

If i'm right, i read somewhere, that CoD stores the video sequences from cutscenes in the Vram, which is one part that fills the Vram.

 

So yes, it's normal.

[Nena Trinity]

What?! You claim that is high? Have you played GTA V?!!!

[SkilledRebuilds]

BLOPS3/AW/IW all do this.

Pre-Caching data.

I have FULL System/FULL VirtualPaging/FULL Vram.

Only when playing these.

 

8GB Ram - 7.7GB Used

Pagefile (Set at 16GB) - 12GB Used (If I set PF to be 8GB, it uses 8GB, so I increased it to 16GB and it 100% removed the only infrequent stutters I was getting)

Vram - Be it a 3.5GB GTX970 or my R9-290, it uses 90-100% of Vram (you can set the % of Vram to use (1.0 = 100%) in the config file)

 

If it works it works, but at times, the stutters the game has without tweaking, makes it seem like a pile of shit in regards to optimization.

[gggg336]

I have 2 gtx 1080 in sli. It doesn't use the 1st gpu and vram use is 99%. Everything is max.