They had trouble increasing memory even before this AI nonsense. Now they have a perverse incentive to keep it low on affordable cards, to avoid undercutting their own industrial-grade products.
Which only matters thanks to anticompetitive practices leveraging CUDA’s monopoly. Refusing to give up the fat margins on professional equipment is what killed DEC. They successfully miniaturized their PDP mainframes, while personal computers became serious business, but they refused to let those run existing software. They crippled their own product and the market destroyed them. That can’t happen, here, because ATI is not allowed to participate in the inflated market of… linear algebra.
The flipside is: why the hell doesn’t any game work on eight gigabytes of VRAM? Devs. What are you doing? Does Epic not know how a texture atlas works?
The flipside is: why the hell doesn’t any game work on eight gigabytes of VRAM? Devs. What are you doing? Does Epic not know how a texture atlas works?
It’s not that they don’t work.
Basically what you’ll see is kinda like a cache miss, except the stall time to go ‘oops, don’t have that’ and go out and get the required bits is very slow, and so you can see 8gb cards getting 20fps, and 16gb ones getting 40 or 60, simply because the path to get the missing textures is fucking slow.
And worse, you’ll get big framerate dips and the game will feel like absolute shit because you keep running into hitches loading textures.
It’s made worse in games where you can’t reasonably predict what texture you’ll get next (ex. Fortnite and other such online things that are you know, played by a lot of people) but even games where you might be able to reasonably guess, you’re still going to run into the simple fact that the textures from a modern game are simply higher quality and thus bigger than the ones you might have had 5 years ago and thus 8gb in 2019 and 8gb in 2025 is not an equivalent thing.
It’s crippling the performance of the GPU that may be able to perform substantially better, and for a relatively low BOM cost decrease. They’re trash, and should all end up in the trash.
That’s what I’m on about. We have the technology to avoid going ‘hold up, I gotta get something.’ There’s supposed to be a shitty version that’s always there, in case you have to render it by surprise, and say ‘better luck next frame.’ The most important part is to put roughly the right colors onscreen and move on.
id Software did this on Xbox 360… loading from a DVD drive. Framerate impact: nil.
the virtual texture tech is not all mighty and you can still run into situation where if the allocation is fewer than you need you run into the page swap. It act similarly to traditional cache miss if you cross certain threshold because you can’t keep enough “tiles” in memory. Texture quality popping and then stuttering is the symptom progressing from lower than needed vram allocated to severely insufficient.
the virtual texture tech is not all mighty and you can still run into situation where if the allocation is fewer than you need you run into the page swap. It act similarly to traditional cache miss if you cross certain threshold because you can’t keep enough “tiles” in memory. Texture quality popping and then stuttering is the symptom progressing from lower than needed vram allocated to severely insufficient.
They had trouble increasing memory even before this AI nonsense. Now they have a perverse incentive to keep it low on affordable cards, to avoid undercutting their own industrial-grade products.
Which only matters thanks to anticompetitive practices leveraging CUDA’s monopoly. Refusing to give up the fat margins on professional equipment is what killed DEC. They successfully miniaturized their PDP mainframes, while personal computers became serious business, but they refused to let those run existing software. They crippled their own product and the market destroyed them. That can’t happen, here, because ATI is not allowed to participate in the inflated market of… linear algebra.
The flipside is: why the hell doesn’t any game work on eight gigabytes of VRAM? Devs. What are you doing? Does Epic not know how a texture atlas works?
It’s not that they don’t work.
Basically what you’ll see is kinda like a cache miss, except the stall time to go ‘oops, don’t have that’ and go out and get the required bits is very slow, and so you can see 8gb cards getting 20fps, and 16gb ones getting 40 or 60, simply because the path to get the missing textures is fucking slow.
And worse, you’ll get big framerate dips and the game will feel like absolute shit because you keep running into hitches loading textures.
It’s made worse in games where you can’t reasonably predict what texture you’ll get next (ex. Fortnite and other such online things that are you know, played by a lot of people) but even games where you might be able to reasonably guess, you’re still going to run into the simple fact that the textures from a modern game are simply higher quality and thus bigger than the ones you might have had 5 years ago and thus 8gb in 2019 and 8gb in 2025 is not an equivalent thing.
It’s crippling the performance of the GPU that may be able to perform substantially better, and for a relatively low BOM cost decrease. They’re trash, and should all end up in the trash.
That’s what I’m on about. We have the technology to avoid going ‘hold up, I gotta get something.’ There’s supposed to be a shitty version that’s always there, in case you have to render it by surprise, and say ‘better luck next frame.’ The most important part is to put roughly the right colors onscreen and move on.
id Software did this on Xbox 360… loading from a DVD drive. Framerate impact: nil.
the virtual texture tech is not all mighty and you can still run into situation where if the allocation is fewer than you need you run into the page swap. It act similarly to traditional cache miss if you cross certain threshold because you can’t keep enough “tiles” in memory. Texture quality popping and then stuttering is the symptom progressing from lower than needed vram allocated to severely insufficient.
the virtual texture tech is not all mighty and you can still run into situation where if the allocation is fewer than you need you run into the page swap. It act similarly to traditional cache miss if you cross certain threshold because you can’t keep enough “tiles” in memory. Texture quality popping and then stuttering is the symptom progressing from lower than needed vram allocated to severely insufficient.