From what I've seen, the faster PCI-E bus is important when you need to shuffle things in and out of VRAM. In a video game, the faster bus reduces the duration of stutters caused by pushing more data into the graphics card.

If you're using a new video card with only 8GB of onboard RAM and are turning on all the heavily-advertised bells and whistles on new games, you're going to be running out of VRAM very, very frequently. The faster bus isn't really important for higher frame rate, it makes the worst-case situations less bad.

I get the impression that many reviewers aren't equipped to do the sort of review that asks questions like "What's the intensity and frequency of the stuttering in the game?" because that's a bit harder than just looking at average, peak, and 90% frame rates. The question "How often do textures load at reduced resolution, or not at all?" probably requires a human in the loop to look at the rendered output to notice those sorts of errors... which is time consuming, attention-demanding work.

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Dylan16807 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

There's a good amount of reviewers showing 1% lows and 0.1% lows, which should capture stuttering pretty well.

I don't know how many games are even capable of using lower resolutions to avoid stutter. I'd be interested in an analysis.

	▲	simoncion 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> I don't know how many games are even capable of using lower resolutions to avoid stutter. Some games may be doing that. I expect that in others, the lower-resolution or missing textures are a result of the texture streaming system catastrophically failing to meet its deadline to load in the relevant textures and giving up. It's my understanding that "texture pop-in" is the too-late replacement of a low-resolution "placeholder" texture with a high-resolution texture. If the high-resolution texture doesn't load in time, then you're stuck with the low-res placeholder. Commentary on textures that fail to load are in the "Monster Hunter: Wilds" section, starting at ~11:35 in [0], and the "Space Marine 2" section starting at ~00:14:40 in [1], which also mentions "Halo: Infinite" and "Forspoken" as other games that have the same sort of behavior. Missing textures are mentioned in the "Star Wars Jedi: Survivor" section starting at 21:21 at [1]. And -while not mentioned- if you look not-that-closely at the first ~5 seconds of that section, you can see the textures (most obviously the ground texture) go from "the same as the 16GB model" to "something you'd expect to see in a bad PS3 game". Also in that first video, you can see some head-to-head demonstrations of the performance problems having a slower PCI-E link gives you when running out of VRAM starting at ~04:52 in the "The Last of Us Part II" section of [0] and also at ~17:00 in the "F1 25" section of that same video. I expect there are a few other videos out there that do this sort of analysis, but I can't be arsed to find them. [0] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG9mFS7lMzU> [1] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdZoa6Gzl6s>

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rbanffy 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m sure Windows performance counters can track the volume of data going between CPU memory and VRAM over the PCIe bus.