Video memory usage - Final Words & Conclusion
What's going on with graphics memory usage ?
Here is a fun fact, the game engine fill whatever amount of graphics memory is available.
So if you have a 4 GB Radeon R9 290X or GeForce GTX 980 then it'll slowly fill that 4GB memory with textures, and then slowly but steadily in a minute or so (if you have disabled pre-caching) your graphics memory utilization will start to rise until nearly maxed out as shaders load up in video memory. Above you can see the Titan Black for example, already filling 5.4 GB of video memory.
Above two examples, 4 gigs of graphics memory are almost filled up for the GTX 980 with 4GB graphics memory. These are the default test settings we use incl. 2x MSAA and high quality textures. Now, to verify that COD will fill it up as much as it can, we tried 6 GB Titan Black as well. And indeed we reach 5.5 GB of used graphics memory. In fact once we started to use super sampling we reached the full 6 GB of used graphics memory.
To get you a little taste of how different the game is and how it looks opposed to previous COD releases, above two in-game action scene examples. This is a GeForce GTX 970 at 2560x1440 with 2x SMAA - 2x Super Sampling - HBAO+ and overall the highest image quality settings.
Wrapping things up
Call of Duty Advanced Warfare will NOT make it into our regular benchmark suite for videocards. As stated in the intro, there are many things odd and off. As such we recommend you to look at the performance benchmarks you've just read with a grain of salt as I have been at the verge and threshold of asking myself the question whether or not to post these results. One test run will result on 50 FPS, the second 46 FPS and another 56 FPS. This means that the results shown today are indicative, not a precise measurement. Another problem was that some levels average out at say 40 FPS, yet there are a handful of scenes where the framerate will crumble down to say 25 FPS or where running a luxurious 60 FPS all of the sudden. But hey, 80% of the game plays with excellent framerates, even with a mainstream card. Overall the game feels smooth in game-play, nothing negative to mention there. In fact dare I say this; the gameplay and rendering overall seems to be much smoother opposed to the previous COD Ghosts.
Now, my motto here was, it's better to show you an indication opposed to nothing. We do hope you like this little test as it will be an indicator of overall performance. Make no mistake, COD AW is one of the better looking games within this series. Sometimes textures look crap though. While in other scenes they look beautiful. Flick on HBAO+ - 2x Super Sampling and 2x SMAA for a nice mixture of quality and decent performance. Leave the caches disabled as this had a small effect on better image quality. All modern graphics cards will run the game at Full HD without any issue. There is just no need to drop down in images quality modes too massively and heck, that's where we as PC gamers needs to be. We do not like to forfeit in quality. As always, we hope you enjoyed this selection of measurements. Let me just state that the story line of the single player campaign is actually fairly nice.
Last words, if you can't run this game fast enough then you REALLY need to upgrade as the games can be played decently on pretty much anything at Full HD really. Small advice, play around with Super Sampling a little, you are really gonna like it. Today (Tuesday the 4th 2014) you can expect the new 344.60 driver released from NVIDIA. AMD has not yet confirmed a new driver update for this title, we asked yesterday and an answer is still pending.
Hilbert out, peace.
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