BF3 lowers IQ if not enough ram?

There was a post by someone I saw as follows:

The game engine will scale texture quality automatically. I get over 2048mb of vram usage in BF3 with my 7970. This worked well with 6950 1gb CrossFire cards for me. Image quality took somewhat of a hit, but performance was very good with two GPU's. Really though I doubt IQ is noticable at all with a 2gb card vs. a 2gb+ card.

Click to expand...

One thing to think about is that BF3 uses more than 2gb of Vram on Ultra settings. The game will automatically lower IQ for the Nvidia card (most likely barely noticable), but performace will be a bit higher.

Click to expand...

I'm looking to find some sort of support/contrary evidence for this assertion. Be it a link from somewhere stating this, or at minimum some screenshots showing the differences.

Backstory: With 1GB of ram @ 1920x1080 4xAA, Ultra, HBAO, I noticed some stuttering in games and ram use maxed at 950+ MB. When moving up to a 1.5GB card (GTX580) with the same settings the ram usage increased to around 1.2GB with no stuttering. With a 2GB card (GTX680) with the same settings, the ram usage increased to around 1.8GB. And with a 3GB card (7970) 1.8GB seemed to level off with those same settings.

I have never seen a game dynamically lower IQ (doesnt mean it doesnt exist of course) with available vram, so Im looking for something more concrete than a forum post. Can anyone help out with some information regarding the Frostbite2 engine doing this as well as some screenshots showing the visual differences?

Thanks!

Perhaps the game automatically removes textures not in use when it needs more space? For instance, it could keep textures in memory from a previous map or previous section of a map if it has the memory availability, but if it doesn't, it discards the least recently used textures?

Contact their PR person as an editor of Overclockers.com, and see if they can connect you to an engineer who can answer your question. ...Or just keep being lazy and wait for forum members to spoonfeed you.

I wouldn't think IQ would vary automatically. Maybe take multiple screenshots using cards with different amounts of vRAM and compare them?

I.M.O.G. said:

Contact their PR person as an editor of Overclockers.com, and see if they can connect you to an engineer who can answer your question. ...Or just keep being lazy and wait for forum members to spoonfeed you.

Click to expand...

EarthDog you just got told

I would think my IQ has nothing to do with how much ram is in my computer. I always thought it was all those blows to head.







Seriously though, that would be interesting to know.