cats_Paw :
Companies are trying to make it look like their games will look better on paper than in reality...
Also, optimization is less important if you can blame the lack of it on some recommended specs that are way crazy.
Its actually a good reason to NOT buy shadow of mordor, as they clearly are trying to hype it to sell (good games dont really need to do that).
No - it makes sense.
Set a package of all the looks and effects you need up - compress it nicely (GPU's can handle the decompression and rendering). Load it to a video card, local to the GPU for it to work from there.
Now the GPU is working straight from its local memory store vs spooling from disk and/or system RAM.
Faster performance with a single load hit at the front end to then render as called upon to do so. No "need this piece.. go get it. need that piece... go get it." It's there in the vRAM.
What has me hacked off:
Modern GPU's can easily render very high quality graphics - NVidia's 600 series on up are all very powerful. It's how fast it can get the stuff to the card and how much the card can store at a time which shifts the differences and most of those are small differences in performance.
Lower price-point 6GB cards started shipping a few months ago - plenty of fanfare about them, etc. Now they're gone. All of them being pulled right as a need for that top capacity is coming out as a prereq to even load the graphics packages.
- It's not a memory shortage or the higher end cards would be scarce.
- It's not a design issue - they existed already.
They were pulled and across all vendors - so the ~$500 range price-point cards are gone and those cards could render HQ images just fine - they just won't load the packages if there isn't enough RAM to do it.
The only cards left with this much capacity are the $1,000+ price tag cards - even though the lower cost cards did exist.
Very odd timing on this and what has me annoyed. "Ok, so go spend $1k+ now". Bullshit.
I'll wait for the costs to come down but there's no way in hell I'd buy a 3GB card anymore no matter the GPU -- it's a trash card if it won't load the top graphics.
Spending thousands on graphics cards... To what: Effectively get lower quality graphics? -- why not crank the look down to low res? Same comparison for "I get good performance".