Question about Video Memory use

[TrainSimJack]

How do Train Sims (ie Openrails) handle scenes with large object counts that would exhaust VRAM?

For example, If one downloaded 500 cars that each had a 4k texture file. That sums up to say 16GB of textures.

How does something like openrails handle this on a video card with 4-8GB of ram?

[eric]

When ORTS starts to be memory starved, I recall that some of the more distant shapes in the viewport start getting rendered without textures.

My current NVidia RTX3050 has 8GB of video RAM. I've yet to see the texture culling or shedding take place, but it happened all the time with an older laptop with an Intel integrated chipset driver.

In practice, I don't know that anyone would be using unique textures at a true 4K resolution. That's a lot of work, but it's also a pain to distribute.

I've got over 11,000 pieces of equipment in my library, and including textures, that's around 16Gb in total. There are 2,000 DDS textures in that (the rest are ACE), which added up come to around 2Gb in total.

[oper190]

Jack, my Trainset folder is 28.5GB in total and I have never experienced a video problem. My desk top is a gamer with Video: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 (4.0 GB RAM), and I am running at a view distance 3500meters and distance mountains at 60km without any problems. Even by business class labtop runs OR okay, just had to back the viewing distance a bit and accept lower frame rates.

[CSRX]

I'll be honest, with some other games that have much higher resolution and graphics, I don't think we have to worry to much with ORTS.

Gears 5, for example, uses 4K resolution and 60fps. Halo Infinite was supposed to be the same, but honestly, looks super cheesy compared to the previous halos that are still 1080p 30fps rated...

[TrainSimJack]

Jack, my Trainset folder is 28.5GB in total and I have never experienced a video problem. My desk top is a gamer with Video: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 (4.0 GB RAM), and I am running at a view distance 3500meters and distance mountains at 60km without any problems. Even by business class labtop runs OR okay, just had to back the viewing distance a bit and accept lower frame rates.

This is what I was thinking about - with a bunch of objects on the screen, is the framerate slowing down because it's that much harder to render, or is it slowing down because the GPU has run out of ram while building a single frame, and the PC needs to send textures back to the GPU, and what you'd see then is actually an IO bottle neck?

[superheatedsteam]

It really depends on the scene. A highly populated route with 100's of unique wagons and locomotives using unique textures will use more resources compared to a 300 car unit train in a desert route where only a hand full of textures are used.

In game press ALT + F5 to bring up the info details then hold ALT + SHIFT and press F5 (about 9 times) till the DEBUG INFORMATION details appear.

Even without the train moving, rotate your view around and see what changes. There is a wealth of information there relating to graphics rendering that may answer some of your questions.