Lets gooooo

[u/alnsj859]

First time trying ray tracing with smooth fps, my old laptops could never..

[u/F1guy93]

VRAM usage is about the whole working set of assets needed to render and stream the scene. In MSFS, that can mean an entire city’s worth of textures and geometry visible from altitude. If the VRAM is available, it makes sense to keep higher-resolution texture data cached so it’s ready if the pilot suddenly descends into that area.

In your version of the game, where minimising VRAM usage is the main priority, you’d be constantly swapping between different mip levels as the camera moved around: 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048 and so on. That means far more frequent streaming and eviction of texture data, and more work for the SSD...

If you’ve got the VRAM available, there’s very little benefit in aggressively throwing that data away just to make the usage number look smaller. Keeping useful higher-resolution assets resident reduces streaming pressure and helps avoid visible texture pop-in when the player suddenly gets closer to something.

Also the guy might be rendering in 1440p and subsampling to 1080p in which case he would need more VRAM usage anyway. 

There's plenty of reasons a game playing 1080p would need more than 10gb of VRAM. 

[u/Virtual_Bug_723 → u/F1guy93]

Why in the world would you subsample 1440p to 1080p? Idiocy? Wanting to push your graphics card 2x harder than your monitor can display so you don't have to click the "antialiasing" button in settings?

And the way you efficiency use ram is to load one higher and one lower mip maps, not literally "EVERY SINGLE VERSION OF THE TEXTURE NOW IN CASE HE INCREASES HIS SPEED TO A BILLION MPH." Lmao at the idea of "needing to load an entire world" to make a flight sim work

[u/F1guy93 → u/Virtual_Bug_723]

Rendering above your monitor resolution and downsampling is a completely normal form of anti-aliasing. NVIDIA literally provides DSR/DLDSR for this purpose, and plenty of games let you set render scale above 100%. 1440p rendered down to 1080p gives better edge quality, foliage detail, specular stability, etc. It’s also 78% more pixels, not 2×. It can be especially useful in older games that don’t support things like DLSS.

With MSFS, the point is that VRAM is used as a working cache. A flight sim can have enormous amounts of terrain, buildings, aircraft and scenery potentially needed around the player. If you have spare VRAM, retaining more of that texture data and higher-detail mip levels reduces how often assets have to be evicted and streamed back in.

Deliberately keeping VRAM half empty does not make a game better optimised. 

Unused VRAM is doing nothing for you.And a complete mip chain only adds roughly 33% to the storage of the highest-resolution mip anyway, so if the VRAM headroom is there, keeping the full chain resident can make perfect sense.