You need 980 Ti, Titan or 1070/1089 to reach 60 fps on Ultra settings at 1080p! Ultra is definitely not something that is targeting 4 GB users.
Yeah I ran into that with Dishonored 2 as well. 4GB GPU + 8GB system RAM will be almost entirely used at times. I ran into some major performance degradation after playing the game for awhile and it would reach this max utilization.
The vague examples I mentioned are observed on our normal testing systems which have plenty of RAM (32 GiByte to be exact). So if we see popping there, developers probably do not run out ot main memory, but rather do use the SSD (not HDD in our case) as direct source. Which would further reinforce your point that streaming works, but must be properly implemented. I think we are still under transition period. Devs have just maxed out current gen console memory budgets (at 1080p). 1440p and 4K displays are starting to get popular among PC gamers. Now again the consoles are the limiting platform -> devs experiment new high end effects and settings on PC -> crazy ultra settings. Both Nvidia
However when we start to consider people buying GPUs now, 4GB is a no go with current trends, as 4GB wouldn't be enough for future titles, they are already not enough for several current titles, even if we don't include games that don't push 60fps. I already gave Doom as an example of a game running @1080p60 with a 970 class GPU and yet you can not enable max Textures/Shadows on 4GB cards even on a 16GB system, There is also Mirror's Edge Catalyst, FuryX can run it at Hyper settings @1080p60, yet the GPU can't do that because it is castrated by it's 4GB VRAM. In Rainbow Six Siege you can run the game fine with the Ultra texture pack @1080p60 but without any form of MSAA or TXAA, else it would shoot VRAM usage to above 4GB and the game starts to stutter. Deus Ex Mankind posts an astonishing 6GB VRAM usage @1080p without MSAA, and even more with it! All of these games behave like this with 16GB of system memory, things become much worse if only 8GB is installed.
I know. My friend had to convince me a lot to get more than 16 GB to my home computer. And 16 GB of DDR4 is just 80$ nowadays. Memory is dirt cheap. Unfortunately devs seem to assume that everyone has bought enough of this dirt cheap memory -> problems with 8 GB.
I think temporal reconstruction solutions are a great optimization start, Rainbow Siege uses one and it reduces VRAM consumption by a great deal while also boosting performance significantly, on a 1070, I was unable to push smooth locked 60fps at 1440p Max settings without resorting to it. Quantum Break's solution was a solid one too and it made the game docile to VRAM. Watch_Dogs 2 implements a similar solution to Rainbow and the results are good except that it breaks Ambient Occlusion which isn't a good trade off in my books. But in general, I believe these solutions are superior to any dynamic resolution technique deployed recently on PC (Forza 6, Forza Horizon 2, Gears Of War 4, Titanfall 2, Shadow Warrior 2).
Watch_Dogs 2 touts HBAO+ implementation. The reconstruction hampers the effect? Is this something you've personally seen or from videos/screenshots?
It is great to see devs finally starting to use temporal reconstruction. Papers have existing for ages. Checkerboard technique in particular is working very well. R6 Siege was the first to use it, but now it is powering 4K rendeing in many PS4 Pro games. Hopefully devs allow checkerboard mode also on PC. I just got a 4K monitor. 4K at 60 fps is definitely achievable with checkerboard rendering (cost is similar to 1440p). Good temporal checkerboard implementation is hard to distinguish from "native" 4K.
Both, I have just noticed it in R6 Siege, and have seen it in screenshots for Watch_Dogs 2:
Yeah, this might be the reason indeed.
Emm, To be honest I never paid attention to it in Rainbow Six till you mentioned it existed there.
Clearly shows it there as well.
I don't think it's the reconstruction that messes up the SSAO implementation. I would guess the lower resolution intermediate buffers (with 2xMSAA jittered samples) causes the SSAO implementation to misbehave. I don't know what kind of changes to the SSAO filter they implemented in order to support the jittered sample pattern properly. If they simply flatten the 2x2 lower res 2xMSAA depth buffer as 2x1 lower resolution intermediate buffer and feed that to SSAO, then the result will be different. And that still requires changes to SSAO algorithm, as the pixels are anamorphic. Checkerboarding is not easy to implement perfectly. Lots of small details that need to be considered.
Yeah, NV had this to say about the matter:
http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/gu...ormance-guide#watch-dogs-2-temporal-filtering
