It was once the case that graphics card RAM wasn’t super important — as long as you had one or two gigabytes of dedicated video memory, you’d be right for most games. The last few days however have utterly wrecked this rule-of-thumb, first with Bethesda’s The Evil Within recommending 4GB and now Shadow of Mordor requesting a massive 6GB for its ultra setting.
Ultra? Pfft, why not just run it at high and be done with it? Well, that’s not going to do you much good, as that setting needs a healthy 3GB. No, the vast majority of consumer graphics cards on the market today will only be able to handle Shadow of Mordor‘s medium texture level, which needs a comparatively paltry 2GB. All these assume you’re running at a resolution of 1920 x 1080.
This information is courtesy of a NeoGAF user called “Regret Truth”, who provided the above screenshot of the game’s video options. Note that the ultra setting requires the “Ultra HD Texture Pack” in order to work and sounds very much like a separate download.
Now, something to keep in mind is that you’ll be able to run the higher settings even if your graphics card doesn’t have the required memory. Instead, your system RAM will be used instead, though this is much slower for the GPU to access. If you don’t have the physical sticks available, then it’ll hit the pagefile and that’s when you’re really in trouble… unless you enjoy punishing every data bus in your PC.
Shadow of Mordor offers Ultra texture optional download, recommends 6GB VRAM @ 1080p [NeoGAF, vis DSOGaming]
Image: Regret Truth / NeoGAF
Comments
21 responses to “Shadow Of Mordor’s Ultra Texture Quality Recommends 6GB Of Video RAM”
Yay! Finally something shooting above lowest common denominator.
Boo! Finally a good game that only nerds with a high disposable income can run.
6GB??? The heck? Is the entire game loaded into the videocard or something?
Ever heard of texture on-demand? Is it to avoid pop-in or something? Is the draw distance continental? Did they invent some kind of quad-buffering for vsync? Does the anti-aliasing go up to 256?
I honestly can’t imagine a game where the visuals require this much video memory…
I’m hoping the draw distance is continental.
I tried that in Minecraft once, took a minute to break a block of dirt…
How many cards available at the moment actually come loaded with 6gb of video memory? The Titan and 295x are all I can thing of.
780 ti in SLi will do. I’ll be picking up my second one early next year myself.
Bear in mind that having cards in XFire or SLI doesn’t double your vram…. I have two 4GB 770’s in SLI, but I do not have 8gb vram….
You can get 6gb 780 cards. Don’t think there is a 6gb 780Ti though. I would say that the 970 & 980 will come out with 6gb options very soon. I also expect well see the latter, or a 990 arrive with 8gb…. Actually, I think there are 6gb 980’s already.
A long time ago there was a nvidia 600 series that had 6gb of video memory… I remember at the time wondering what the hell it’d be used for, but when you turn the box over it shows that it’s marketed towards people who have 4 + monitor setups.
The 295x doesn’t actually have 6GB of memory. Keep in mind that Dual-GPU cards from both AMD and Nvidia advertise their “combined vram” when in reality…it doesn’t work like that. For example, the GTX Titan Z is advertised as a card with 12GB of VRAM. Which…is true. But because it’s actually 2 separate GPU’s linked through SLI, you only have 6GB of VRAM to use, because the same data has to be loaded on to both of those 6GB cards (even though they are in one single unit).
Also as a side note…I thought the 295x had 8GB of VRAM (4GB actual/per card)
Must be pretty poorly optimized to require such a ludicrous amount of V-Ram.
I agree. I hate it when people are like “ITS GOT HIGH REQS SO IT MUST BE AMAZING GRAPHICALLY!”, no, it just means the engine is bad or they have done shit all regarding optimization.
Or they have a wide range of high resolution textures used in each cell and therefore require a lot of unique assets to be loaded at a time. The second you stop using tiles for assets in a game the requirements tend to shoot through the roof. For the last eight years gaming technology requirements slowed down because the consoles that the games were aimed at were largely behind the times and/or included proprietary technology resulting in publishers designing all their games based on said tech. Now we have new consoles which are designed with the intention of them being somewhat future proof which means for the next three to four years there will be an abundance of titles coming out with graphical requirements which will mean a lot of us will have to upgrade.
I also agree. The last game I bought on PC that required such high levels of vram was Watch_Dogs. We all know how that went at launch…. Haven’t played since.
Developer –
“Not every rock is the same… As you can see here, we have over 100, 000 different types of rock textures to really give the feeling of realism to the player… Also, we have an upcoming DLC that releases yet another 100, 000 different types of rock textures, requiring a total of 12gb of GPU RAM… The game itself has a lot of stealth and waiting around elements, so we’re quite happy to be able to give the player something pretty to look at… Players will be saying ‘Wow! Look at that rock! I’m sure glad I was able to spend $5000 on a new quad sli/crossfire setup’”
Yay! Finally a use for all that memory on my Titan!
So my rig has 8GB DDR3 RAM, and my video card comes with 2GB DDR5 VRAM. And a gpu running at 3.4GHz So at 1080p I will get horrid frame rates? Sweet, so I’m gonna have to push my clock speeds harder just to try and keep up? (and buy another 8GB since my first pair has been removed due to BSODs)
It’s not a processing power deficiency this article is about. It’s a GPU VRAM deficiency. Getting more system RAM won’t help, nor will higher clocks. It’s just the textures.
They did say that it will fall back on system ram though. Plus in order to meet the vram requirements you’d have to have a xfire/sri build
In that case, unless you have a 1gb VRAM card, buying more sys RAM still won’t help unless you only have 2-4gb of sys ram. SLI/XFIRE configs don’t double the amount of available VRAM you have. The data sent to VRAM is mirrored on both cards, so having 2x4GB cards still only means you have 4GB VRAM. I wouldn’t worry about these requirements. Medium texture quality is probably par for the course and that’s around 2gb vram.
My card runs on 2GB DDR5 VRAM. I specifically picked 2 because it’s the balance of cost versus grunt. I was hoping to get a game that I could use as a way to gauge if my old faithful and soon to be built new comer will be able to handle the demand of a nice looking game. I guess I could just buy it for PS4, but the pc master race…
Damn the pc master race, always compelling me with much beauty and demanding nothing less than a personal loan while I’m at it
Just grab a 6GB 780 card. Job done.
Now when are the 980s coming out with 8GB?