Does FPS depend on the textures quality?

[lZKoce]

Hi all, I hope you have a useful weekend. I have this impression and decided to get a firm answer about. Does FPS depend on the texture quality? I am asking in the case of small resolutions- let's say a laptop resolution of 1366x768. The cards of the today's laptops start at 1/2GB minimum and I was wondering does it affect the games if the textures are on low or high>? I tried with StarCraft2 running the textures on low and ultra and it didn't affect the frame rates, but when I try the same with Blacklight Retribution between minimum and maximum it does make a difference. Are the textures of the game solely loaded into the VRAM? or they require some resources from the GPU core as well, which in turn affects the frames?

[lyndonguitar]

it does, every setting does

[Bo$$]

textures will stress GPU's minimally if they have large amount of memory available. hence at your resolution it is easy to run with 512mb of Vram.

Some of the newer games are MUCH more memory intensive hence will take a small hit to FPS

[Kreij]

It's not exactly the texture quality (texture size) that determines the FPS, but the GC's capability of handling them.
A game will try to load all of the assets it needs for a particular scene into the GC's memory. If all of the assets fit in VRAM then the FPS will be determined by how fast the GC can fill the backbuffers for display to the monitor. If a game can fits all of its assets into a 1GB card, having a 2GB card will not help framerates.
If the VRAM will not hold all of the assets (for instance, really large textures), then you will definiitely see a drop in frame rates due to swapping info into the VRAM from the system to the GC.
Developers deal with these kinds of issues using tesselation and other "tricks" to try to maintain acceptable FPS in varying GC scenarios.

[lZKoce]

"how fast" it loads them into the backbuffer...so it does depend on other factors than VRAM. I thought that if you have 2GB of VRAM you are pretty much invincible for any game title out there. My case was GT630M- 2GB DDR3 across 128 bit bus width/ 16ROPs/40nm, I don't know which DirectX supports natively- I think 11. So tasselation can make the game run smoother? Should I turn it on when I have the opportunity?

[erocker]

In some games, textures are loaded directly from the HDD/SSD. So, in some cases a SSD will help.

[Kreij]

Originally Posted by lZKoce

"how fast" it loads them into the backbuffer...so it does depend on other factors than VRAM. I thought that if you have 2GB of VRAM you are pretty much invincible for any game title out there. My case was GT630M- 2GB DDR3 across 128 bit bus width/ 16ROPs/40nm, I don't know which DirectX supports natively- I think 11. So tasselation can make the game run smoother? Should I turn it on when I have the opportunity?

Tesselation algorithms are use to dynamically adjust the level of detail (LOD) given a specific distance of objects from the viewer. The farther away an object is, the less detail it will get. This can help greatly with frame rates, but not everyone likes it as long distance viewing (in the case of a large world) can look grainy and not well defined.

2GB cards, while not "invincible" are adequate at most of the common resolutions. Many tests show that over 2GB do not produce any real advantages over a 3 or 4 GB solution for gaming.

Your best bet is to adjust your setting to get the best combination of frame rates and image quality that you find acceptable. Since I use a 30" monitor, I turn off AA as I really don't need it. This helps frame rates, but would not be so good on a lower res monitor.

[Frag Maniac]

There's no real blanket answer to your question. Different games have different results when changing in-game texture resolution.

That said, for the most part lower display resolutions and higher GPU power and VRAM capacity are more resilient to handling games.

[NdMk2o1o]

Originally Posted by lZKoce

"how fast" it loads them into the backbuffer...so it does depend on other factors than VRAM. I thought that if you have 2GB of VRAM you are pretty much invincible for any game title out there. My case was GT630M- 2GB DDR3 across 128 bit bus width/ 16ROPs/40nm, I don't know which DirectX supports natively- I think 11. So tasselation can make the game run smoother? Should I turn it on when I have the opportunity?

When it comes to texture size the larger the VRAM you have will help as it saves having the game to load textures into RAM (which is quite a lot slower than vRAM or GDDR5 which most modern cards have nowadays) however you still need a good GPU to be able to render the game, so having a low end GPU with lots of vRAM makes little difference when running mopdern games, because yes you can fit lots of textures into the vRAM but the GPU isn't strong enough to output them on high settings, high resolution at a decent framerate (FPS) hence why you might not have seen a difference going from low>ultra textures if the GPU you are referring to is the 630 as you later mentioned, if that's the case you will need to reduce the visual qualities to improve FPS.

[Pehla]

im playin wolr of tanks on my laptop on many detalis on low and some on medium... and i have like min20-max 50 fps...and if i turn fw more deatails to even medium not to mention high i can hardly play the game.. i get like 6fps maybe more.. so yes higher details more gpu load =lower fps!!

[LAN_deRf_HA]

Typically high res packs seem to only hit for a frame or 2, unless we're talking about skyrim. The exceptions being if you're going over the ram limit of your card. Then it can hit hard.

[ViperXTR]

i remember more stuttering when i still have my 1GB 460 for SKyrim with Hi res texture packs installed, seeing it in MSI Afterburner and its using all of the vram hehe, got a 2Gb GTX 660 and its now consuming around ~1.5-1.8Gb 0_0