What happens if VRAM gets used up in this game?

[Ka'shurio]

I have a 2GB VRAM card, and so far, I have a city that is 120,000 pop, and has around 75% of the land used up for high density buildings.

My VRAM usage at the moment can range from 1.2GB to 1.8GB, which is close to the 2.048GB VRAM limit.

Let's say if I were to fill up all the land and reach 100% development, it may reach a point where my VRAM gets used up.

If it does, will it crash, or just throttle down (stutter)?

[Tankfriend]

Well, standard procedure would be that your system would try to compensate any missing VRAM space by drawing on your main system RAM. That's slower than the VRAM directly on the graphics card, so your performance will take a hit.

And if even your system RAM runs out, then there's still the virtual memory / page file on your hard disc(s) as a last fall-back plan for your system. But this is so slow compared to actual RAM that it's probably next to useless for your graphics card, which needs to shovel around a lot of data in quick succession. By this point, the game will probably be unplayably slow, or just freeze / crash.

Apart from getting even more VRAM / RAM, you can only lower your graphics settings, so your graphics card has to use less VRAM than it does now.

[Termite]

It seems to use up whatever VRAM you have. I have a 3gb GPU and Cities will use just under 3gb.

[Ka'shurio]

Termite の投稿を引用：

It seems to use up whatever VRAM you have. I have a 3gb GPU and Cities will use just under 3gb.

Oh I see. Thanks. I thought it will use up till a certain point then crash.

Thanks Tankfriend and Termite.

[leftbehind]

I have a whopping 512MB VRAM and it just swaps stuff in and out as needed.

[grapplehoeker]

I have a GTX560Ti and 1GB of VRAM. I've played with huge cities of over 400k pop and do experience a slowing down, but I've never experienced stutter or crashes.

[Mr Lowe]

The size of the city doesn't affect vram usage as much as the number of DIFFERENT assets on screen at once. The more assets you have (and the larger their textures), the more vram it takes to hold that as it is displayed on screen.

[Mansen]

Mr Lowe の投稿を引用：

The size of the city doesn't affect vram usage as much as the number of DIFFERENT assets on screen at once. The more assets you have (and the larger their textures), the more vram it takes to hold that as it is displayed on screen.

Depends on the version of DirectX - If you look at Tropico 5, they use the GPU for the ingame AI. :)

[grapplehoeker]

Mr Lowe の投稿を引用：

The size of the city doesn't affect vram usage as much as the number of DIFFERENT assets on screen at once. The more assets you have (and the larger their textures), the more vram it takes to hold that as it is displayed on screen.

It's fair to say that a city of 400k pop,in terms of size, is naturally going to have a hell of a lot more assets than one of 100k or 50k. Anyone that is familiar with cities of those sizes will grasp that and it is far easier to describe a city that way than to sit down and count the number of assets used. Gawd knows I can't be bothered to do a tally of that many just to reply to a post lol ;)

[a Fly]

I can definitely say a word about this. I play Skylines with a great city of 300.000 cims and a huge amount of custom assets.
PC specs are:
GTX 970 4 GB
AMD FX-8320 4,2 Ghz
Kingston FuryX 16 GB 1866 DDR3 ram
120 GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD
1 TB Seagate Baracuda

My GTX 970 has a dedicated VRAM of 4GB. If I put my graphics on the highest, it exeeds this limit and eats into my normal RAM by using over 6 GB according to MSI Afterburner software. I cannot have it at such high settings anymore because the game ultimately crashes after a few minutes. Setting the texture quality a tad lower results in uglier graphics but a more manageable vram usage of around 4 gb without crashes.

It does not matter "where" on the map you look, as the game renders everything into the vram upon startup. When that limit is exceeded it continues to load onto normal RAM.

Lower textures = lower videoram usage.

[maestro]

I'm so depressed about VRAM. 3 months ago I get a GTX 960 with 2GB VRAM because 4GB cards were at least $300. Now ATI has all these 4GB cards for $200.. even the 8GB cards are suddenly way cheaper... what timing.. well you live and you learn i guess..

[El Presidente]

e5.Mæstro の投稿を引用：

I'm so depressed about VRAM. 3 months ago I get a GTX 960 with 2GB VRAM because 4GB cards were at least $300. Now ATI has all these 4GB cards for $200.. even the 8GB cards are suddenly way cheaper... what timing.. well you live and you learn i guess..

You should have researched trends in Vidio cards before buying then you might have seen this comming and considered waiting a bit longer. As you said you live and learn.

[76561198138879198]

vram is responsible for accomodation of 3D texture quality/resolution/detail. the more objects the more textures are generated. the more objects with high texture quality/resolution/detail, the more vram gets used up. but the smaller an object is, the smaller texture on the object is generated. and the lower the quality of texture is, the less vram gets used up. every game has limited graphics resolution, no game in this universe has unlimited graphics resolution (~ * ~ resolution). so, no matter how many textures there are or how large/wide the texture is on a game, the graphics is always on its limited/defined resolution.

this game requires 2 GB VRAM as a "recommended specification". so no matter how many textures there are or how large/wide a texture is on a scene, the whole resolution will never be more than how much the graphics resolution was defined so it wont take more than 2 GB vram. if we move to another/new scene on a game, it will generate other textures but the graphics resolution wont ever be extended. thats why sometimes we see blur texture then it becomes clear immediately while we're moving to another scene on the game (the speed of texture mapping depends on gpu). although it has reached 100% development, the graphics will always be on its defined resolution and wont take more than 2 GB VRAM.

[xstar960]

This game seems to have very high vram usage when using mods.

It would be nice to not have the vram totally full when playing but I guess that depends on how many mods are loaded.

[Scouten]

i used to run so many mods it would devistate the 3GB card i had ended up buying another 16GB ram kit to compensate at the time now im running an 11GB card and doing much better