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simoncion 2 days ago

> 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>