STALKER was a much hyped title but didn't quite deliver on all fronts upon release earlier this year, but it's still a sound game and an expansion pack is due for release first quarter next year. It doesn't have the completely seamless world environments of Oblivion, but the general play areas are massive and well detailed. Once again, all of the details were set to the maximum values, and we recorded the amount of local memory being used:
VRAM usage across resolutions and AA
VRAM usage across presets
Remarkably, at these settings, resolution and anti-aliasing (enabled and tested with both the in-game setting and graphics card's drivers) make little difference to the RAM usage, for most of the resolutions - don't forget that the resolution axis on the graph isn't linear, so sudden jumps in the trendlines are to be expected. This is probably because STALKER isn't performing as much resolution-dependent rendering, such as post-processing. The game and drivers are also likely to be requesting the memory in a way that RivaTuner's plugin isn't checking for, when it comes to AA.
Static Lighting + Minimum Detail
Static Lighting + Maximum Detail
Dynamic Lighting + Minimum Detail
Dynamic Lighting + Maximum Detail
STALKER has an array of settings to control the level of graphical detail, but the most important one is the overall lighting: set to static, the game just uses DX8-level shaders and the minimum of effects, but on dynamic, the full gamut of DX9 trickery is brought into action. As one can see for the above screenshots, it may not make an enormous difference to the outside visuals but the impact of memory is substantial: a 256MB graphics card isn't going to be sufficient to play it with dynamic lighting and minimum effects, and not experience the potential problem of swapping data constantly around. Although the maximum preset does not push all of the detail sliders to their highest values, it's still enough to demand over 400MB of onboard RAM at 1600 x 1200.
Edit (7th Nov): Thanks go to the better memory of NukemNazi, one of our forum regulars, for reminding me that STALKER uses a technique called deferred shading to handle its global lighting and post-processing shader effect, when dynamic lighting is selected. This method means the scene has to be rendered multiple times and stored in the local memory, which is why STALKER consumes so much across all of the resolutions. DirectX 9 doesn't allow antialiasing to be applied to the "extra" frames, so the game's own AA slider applies a shader effect to blur the edges of objects. Using the graphics card's AA system doesn't work, which is why there was no additional memory consumption with AA applied.
But this is all outside - what about a modern game that confines one to a much more restricted play area?
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