VRAM Usage - Image quality vs perf | DX12 vs Vulkan

Graphics memory (VRAM) usage

How much graphics memory does the game utilize versus your monitor resolution with different graphics cards and respective VRAM sizes? Well, let's have a look at the chart below compared to the three main tested resolutions. The listed MBs used in the chart are the measured utilized graphics memory during our testing. Keep in mind, these are never absolute values. Graphics memory usage can fluctuate per game scene and activity in games.

This game will consumer VRAM once you start to move around in-game, memory utilization is dynamic and can change at any time. Often the denser and more complex a scene is (entering a village with lots of buildings for example) results in higher usage. With your close to the maximum quality settings this game tries to stay at a 6 GB threshold. This is why I am for a year or so now am yelling that people should have at least 6 GB for graphics card memory and preferably go with 8GB. Overall the VRAM utilizations seems and feels really balanced with little to no swapping during gameplay.

Image quality modes

Let's have a peek at the best and worst image quality differences and the performance effect of them. The game offers several preset quality modes ranging from low to best image quality. We'll be comparing them starting at low, mostly backgrounds like mountains, vegetation, shadows, and water effects are responsible for the biggest differences as well as dropping or lowering antialiasing. In our benchmark set, later on, you will notice we will always op the best possible and playable image quality setting, as you are a PC gamer right? We want good image quality in our games.

This game at Ultra settings is going to shock you not only for image quality but also a massive attack on performance. You'd figure that a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is capable enough at Ultra HD in Ultra quality settings? Think again, you'll need to drop image quality back towards  "Favor performance mode". It is bizarre that your framerate will double that easily. We'll still have to check out more precisely how far this affects image quality overall. 

DX12 and Vulkan

Much to my surprise, the game supports the Vulkan API. We found no significant enough performance differences though after a quick run back and forth. For this test (and we are very GPU bound), DX12 is marginally faster.