Erm, no, no, nope, NOPE.
- Streaming engines use LESS VRAM. That's the whole point of this tech. It loads textures into memory on the fly for the region of the game you're currently in, not whole level at start of the game. Killing Floor 2 most certainly DOES use texture streaming. I made a tweaker for it around this very feature for the game. Original Killing Floor is UE 2.5 game, of course it doesn't have texture streaming.
- See first point.
- Triangles or polygons have absolutely nothing to do with any of it.
- Tessellation has absolutely nothing to do with any of it.
- Texture streaming or streaming engine, same exact thing. Except first streams only textures, second can stream also world objects/entities. Texture streaming does in fact precache textures so they are ready for the engine before it actually needs them. If that was not the case, you'd see world without textures because you wouldn't have them when needed or they'd pop up into existence which is very unwanted behavior. Which is why you have to preemptively fetch them into memory (precache) and make them available to the engine a bit before they are actually needed. All this is happening in the background, all the time. Which is why such games experience stuttering with HDD's, because the game is constantly fetching data and loading it into VRAM, but HDD's do it very slowly. But the gain is, you need way less VRAM, because at any point, you don't have textures of whole level in VRAM, you only have for a small section of level where you're currently located. Textures fill majority of VRAM during rendering. Like 3/4 of VRAM are textures. The rest are model meshes, entities and framebuffer (+other game data).
. Since the leaks are so scarce, I wouldn't expect anything before june this year (Fury X and RX 480 series launched at about the same timeframe).