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
There must be something else causing the increased memory usage, or simply poor coding from the developers.
I suspect that either the comparison is not "apples to apples", the game is buggy/"unpolished" or the game is doing something very unusual.
Edit: I also want to remind that Titan RTX with its massive 672 GB/s memory bandwidth only leaves about 11.2 GB/s per frame at 60 FPS (for example), so I doubt that all of this is "scratch space".
Or let me put it another way; if a game is using >10GB of "scratch space" in a single frame, just writing it once and then reading it once during the fragment shader part of the rendering would result in a maximum ~10 FPS on a Titan RTX. So you will be bottlenecked by memory bandwidth long before capacity if you intend to use this much in a single frame.
hbcc anyone?
I'll have to find it again, but there was a good video on why the programs that report VRAM usage aren't accurate because they report the amount of VRAM allocated not the amount actually utilized.
There was a time in early beta testing that hbcc didn't work properly, but that's been a long time and it isn't an issue anymore.
Turn it on, max out the slider and call it a day and forget about it. ;)
Not ready for prime-time...
Remedy will be just fine. They’ve never been about having overwhelming sales. Rather, having technically impressive games that transcend physics, etc has been their thing.