Dr.Flay wrote:@Carbon
I agree not relevant to a modern system, and based on 1 (highly optimised) PC, but until now nobody has ever bothered to reply with their own tests.
Until we can get people with a mix of CPUs, MoBo chipsets (v.important) and GFX cards to submit results, it is still not very scientific.
Ask people to test their internet speeds and they are all over it, but this is taking f***ing years !
The tests were on my old indestructible Asus MoBo. Still the most responsive, robust and reliable PC I've had.
Executive paging was disabled in XP. That is the only change to RAM usage, so it only writes to disk when it actually runs out of RAM.
No changes were made to the OS or drivers, between swapping renderers, and both renderers were set with the same options.
The major issue that PC has with GFX card incompatibility is using an ATI card and drivers, with an nForce chipset and drivers.
nVidia and ATI do not play happily together.
I should get round to doing some tests on this new completely AMD / ATI Win 7 system, which has been tweaked almost the same as the XP box.
Executive paging is disabled again, but more because it is using an SSD so I don't want excessive disk-writes.
Generally I tend to find that the DX modes are happier with overlay so I can see my Trillian chat or the raptr interface ingame, and capturing / streaming is more reliable.
Well, for what it's worth, I put up my numbers, though without screenshots, on a fairly new and powerful system: Win7 Ult x64, 4770K, Asus-Z87-Pro, 8GB 1866, Asus R9 280x TOP 3GB (14.6 Cats), Samsung Evo 256GB SSD. The GFX card is certainly being used typically around 500MB.
My page file is not disabled; not that it would matter as the page file is not utilized with UT given the RAM and GRAM avaliable. As for the writes to an SSD, I know this drive will last longer than I will want it to, so I am not really concerned. SSD prices are falling daily as well, as size is increasing. Besides, they are proving much more robust than were initially given credit. Frankly, tweaking the page file is very XP and really won't show much benefit in Win 7. One can alternately move it off the SSD, but maintain it without worry, though this seems a bit silly; the page file, if used, benefits greatly from being on an SSD.
Anyhow, I think it is safe to say that UT uses VRAM on AMD cards, except on perhaps very old systems.