Control Can Use Up to 18.5GB of Video Memory

[btarunr]

"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.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Metroid]

i'd say is normal, resident evil 2 remake uses all 8gb on 4k if you set all high, on 8k that would double.

 

[HD64G]

At least Vega GPUs make use of HBCC that allow the user to dedicate a part of the disk in order to store there textures and increase the VRAM capacity of it. I wonder if the reviewers know and use it properly. A great feature imho that all the high-tier GPUs (when launched) need to have in order to improve their long lasting use to their owners.

 

[londiste]

Did I miss something or the source article had no FPS graphs or FPS mentioned?
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?

 

[Nuke Dukem]

Are you guys doing an in-house performance testing article for this one? I've been curious about that for the last few days. @W1zzard ?

 

[W1zzard]

Are you guys doing an in-house performance testing article for this one? I've been curious about that for the last few days. @W1zzard ?

Almost finished with it, just writing conclusion

 

[robb]

what kind of idiotic clickbait article is this? plenty of games will use an insane amount of vram at 8k especially when maxed out. hell I can push my 1080 ti to over 10 gb at 5k in some cases and 8k is well over twice the pixels of 5k. this nonsense is irrelevant as even the Titan RTX would not deliver playable performance at 8k on those settings anyway.

 

[piloponth]

I imagine what is a 8k (or even 4k) with RTX good for, except for making static screenshots with current generation of graphics cards?

 

[Space Lynx]

It's not click bait. This is actually very impressive, no games have ever used this much before, and by a large margin. It's interesting, nothing more.

Control might be the new "test" game to compare next gen card gains, etc.

 

[JalleR]

BF V @4k can use around 10 GB and thats without RTX and some settings on what the step under MAXIMUM is called... soooo...

 

[Calmmo]

Many games can allocate as much as they want when available, using that is a completely different thing. Trey racing mirrors vram for the RT and raster parts so it's not "that" crazy.

 

[looniam]

Did I miss something or the source article had no FPS graphs or FPS mentioned?
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?

i wnet to the tweaktown article and on the 6th page click on the screen shot at the top. that doesn't show an fps counter but hitting the previous arrow showed more images in the gallery:

TweakTown.com Enlarged Image

An enlarged full size image from https://www.tweaktown.com content.

www.tweaktown.com

TweakTown.com Enlarged Image

An enlarged full size image from https://www.tweaktown.com content.

www.tweaktown.com

TweakTown.com Enlarged Image

An enlarged full size image from https://www.tweaktown.com content.

www.tweaktown.com

yeah i'd call that an 8K slide show.

 

[the54thvoid]

What was the memory usage at 8k without RTX?

 

[Ruru]

And I'm whining that 4GB of my cards isn't enough today.

 

[robb]

It's not click bait. This is actually very impressive, no games have ever used this much before, and by a large margin. It's interesting, nothing more.

Control might be the new "test" game to compare next gen card gains, etc.

you are laughably clueless. this is at 8k and with ray tracing and max settings. and AGAIN plenty of games can use this much vram at 8k on max settings. I can already max all 11gb of my vram in some games at 5k so what do you think would happen at well over twice the pixels to push?

 

[londiste]

What was the memory usage at 8k without RTX?

14 600 MB

Interesting, TweakTown has 7.6/8.1 GB at 4k while TPU's story has 6.5 GB (without RTX):

Control Benchmark Test & RTX Performance Analysis

Control by Remedy Games is an open-world third-person shooter set in a building. Besides the interesting setting, graphics are great, and the game has support for multiple NVIDIA RTX raytracing technologies, probably making this the first game where RTX is really worth it.

www.techpowerup.com

 

[robb]

And I'm whining that 4GB of my cards isn't enough today.

vram is the least of your worries if trying to play games maxed at 16x the resolution of 1080p. no game running at settings that needs that much vram would be playable anyway on modern gpus.

 

[delshay]

i'd say is normal, resident evil 2 remake uses all 8gb on 4k if you set all high, on 8k that would double.

Hold on. I post a link & screenshot of resident evil 2 using upto 14GB of VRAM on Techpowerup some time ago @4K. If the game is using upto 14GB of VRAM @4K then 8K is going to go though the roof & I don't think even 24GB of VRAM will be enough.

EDIT: Does anyone know if this game support Vulkan API?

 

[Xaled]

Did I miss something or the source article had no FPS graphs or FPS mentioned?
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?

This is an RTX Titan advertorial
who made the test says he has 4k@144hz, 3k@200hz and 8k@60hz monitors but he tested the memory usage instead of FPS.

 

[yotano211]

All we need now is a 8k 120hz monitor that doesnt cost $10k+.

 

[spectatorx]

If that would be at common resolutions like 1920x1080 or 2560x1440 or even at 4k i would consider it as memory leak but at 8k? That's expected value.

 

[bonehead123]

Reminds me of the quote: "Can you smell what da Rock is cookin ????"

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

 

[Steevo]

So with eye candy turned in the new Nvdia effects cause the new Nvidia cards to slow down to unplayable FPS and don't have enough memory to support the game in question at the resolution a high end system could/should be able to.


Sounds perfect. We should all buy 3.

 

[efikkan]

Allocated memory doesn't equate required memory or even beneficial memory.
It's not uncommon to allocate a percentage of memory for caches etc., this doesn't mean a game need all this memory.

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…

No, graphics memory is managed by the graphics driver. The OS kernel does not control it directly.

vram is the least of your worries if trying to play games maxed at 16x the resolution of 1080p. no game running at settings that needs that much vram would be playable anyway on modern gpus.

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.

 

[fullinfusion]

At least Vega GPUs make use of HBCC that allow the user to dedicate a part of the disk in order to store there textures and increase the VRAM capacity of it. I wonder if the reviewers know and use it properly. A great feature imho that all the high-tier GPUs (when launched) need to have in order to improve their long lasting use to their owners.

You meant to say HBCC uses system memory