Wednesday, September 4th 2019
Control Can Use Up to 18.5GB of Video Memory
"Control" by Remedy is the season's hottest AAA release, not just because it's an above-average story-driven action RPG, but also because it's an eye candy-shop. With the ability to use NVIDIA RTX real-time raytracing across a multitude of features, the game is particularly heavy on graphics hardware. Tweaktown tested the game's stability at extremely high display resolutions, including 8K, and found that the game can use up to 18.5 GB of video memory, when running in DirectX 12 with RTX enabled. There's only one client-segment graphics card capable of that much memory, the $2,499 NVIDIA TITAN RTX, which ships with 24 GB of GDDR6 memory. Its nearest client-segment neighbor is the AMD Radeon VII, but it only packs 16 GB of HBM2.
When a game needs more video memory than your graphics card has, Windows has an elaborate memory management system that sheds some of that memory onto your system's main memory, and the swap file progressively (at reduced performance, of course). Video memory usage drops like a rock between 8K and 4K UHD (which is 1/4th the pixels as 8K). With all RTX features enabled and other settings maxed out, "Control" only uses 8.1 GB of video memory. What this also means is that video cards with just 8 GB of memory are beginning fall short of what it takes to game at 4K. The $699 GeForce RTX 2080 Super only has 8 GB. The RTX 2080 Ti, with its 11 GB of memory has plenty of headroom and muscle. Find other interesting observations in the source link below.
Source:
Tweaktown
When a game needs more video memory than your graphics card has, Windows has an elaborate memory management system that sheds some of that memory onto your system's main memory, and the swap file progressively (at reduced performance, of course). Video memory usage drops like a rock between 8K and 4K UHD (which is 1/4th the pixels as 8K). With all RTX features enabled and other settings maxed out, "Control" only uses 8.1 GB of video memory. What this also means is that video cards with just 8 GB of memory are beginning fall short of what it takes to game at 4K. The $699 GeForce RTX 2080 Super only has 8 GB. The RTX 2080 Ti, with its 11 GB of memory has plenty of headroom and muscle. Find other interesting observations in the source link below.
38 Comments on Control Can Use Up to 18.5GB of Video Memory
Is there a high-profile game today that does not use dynamic texture pool? Basically, does the game need that much memory or is capable of utilizing it if it is available?
Control might be the new "test" game to compare next gen card gains, etc.
www.tweaktown.com/image.php?image=images.tweaktown.com/content/9/1/9131_23_control-tested-8k-nvidia-titan-rtx-vs-amd-radeon-vii-showdown.jpg
www.tweaktown.com/image.php?image=images.tweaktown.com/content/9/1/9131_22_control-tested-8k-nvidia-titan-rtx-vs-amd-radeon-vii-showdown.jpg
www.tweaktown.com/image.php?image=images.tweaktown.com/content/9/1/9131_21_control-tested-8k-nvidia-titan-rtx-vs-amd-radeon-vii-showdown.jpg
yeah i'd call that an 8K slide show.
Interesting, TweakTown has 7.6/8.1 GB at 4k while TPU's story has 6.5 GB (without RTX):
www.techpowerup.com/review/control-benchmark-test-performance-nvidia-rtx/5.html
EDIT: Does anyone know if this game support Vulkan API?
who made the test says he has 4k@144hz, 3k@200hz and 8k@60hz monitors but he tested the memory usage instead of FPS.
It seems that game makers are now including the "AAA/bloatware/upgrade-or-die" tax.....as cards that have >>8GB of VRAM are very expensive, but that's what they are pushing you to buy just so you can play the latest & greatest......
And it seems like a form of price fixing to me, with the GPU mfgr's most likely in on it too, so they can look forward to a new/increased revenue stream over the next few years...
Soooo glad I use my computers for more productive stuff :D
Sounds perfect. We should all buy 3.
It's not uncommon to allocate a percentage of memory for caches etc., this doesn't mean a game need all this memory.No, graphics memory is managed by the graphics driver. The OS kernel does not control it directly.While the rendering workload grows almost proportional to pixel count, memory usage does not.
A single 4K framebuffer takes up about ~32 MB(32-bit per pixel, which is typical, HDR may take a little more), so even with multiple render passes, AA and various other temporary framebuffers, it still doesn't add up to that many hundred MBs of memory. It did matter a lot back when we had 64 MB or less, but ever since we got GBs, graphics resources (textures, meshes etc.) has been the main consumer of graphics memory, and is usually independent of screen resolution.