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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

This is cool, just on general principle. Upgrades of obsolete hardware for no reason other than the thrill of hacking? I'm a fan.

However, as somebody who had a 6MB Voodoo (Pure3D from Canopus) back in the day I can tell you -- that extra memory is just about useless.

Found this article with some benchmarks. The initial batch of 3dfx games didn't target the extra memory of the 6MB cards, because they were a niche within a niche already. Some later titles apparently benefitted a bit, about 4% on average:

https://vintage3d.org/3dfx1.php

...although, unlike the author of the article, I'm not entirely sure it was due to the extra texture memory? IIRC some 3dfx Voodoo cards were clocked a bit higher than others by default? I know the Canopus Pure3D could be overclocked in software:

http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/overclocking.htm

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> that extra memory is just about useless.

Same goes today, unless you're doing other things than just gaming. But top of the line cards come with 24GB VRAM, most games never come close to using that much VRAM.

That is, reportedly, beginning to change. I've been seeing reports of TLOU PC port choking on cards with 10gb of vram, only getting decent once you crest 12gb.

It may take until the _next_ console generation for 24gb cards to get well and truly utilized, but the 12gb seen on Nvidia's current midrange cards may quickly feel anemic.

Looks like new features coming up in DirectX 12 updates will allow for more access to VRAM as well.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/dx12-optimization-cpu-gpu-...

> I've been seeing reports of TLOU PC port choking on cards with 10gb of vram, only getting decent once you crest 12gb.

That seems more because devs didn't do a good job in porting a 10 year old game (released in 2013) that ran perfectly fine on a PS3, which only had 256MB of system RAM and 256MB of VRAM. The PC TLOU port is not advancing the state-of-the-art in graphics, it should not be seen as a sign of the new normal.

I believe what's being spoken about is the PC port of the recently released TLOU remake, which is native to the PS5 and designed to leverage its hardware fully. It's still a bad port, but not so bad that it's a 10 year old game struggling to run on a current generation PC.

TLOU Part I != TLOU (2013). It's a complete remake from the ground up built off of TLOU Part II engine enhancements. Your point still stands that it's a bad port as it runs on the PS5 just fine and shouldn't be choking decently spec'd PCs.

24GB of VRAM is awesome for running AI models though.

It seemed to make substantial difference to Hogwarts Legacy when the seasons changed and almost all textures needed reloading.

It could have been avoided of course. But the difference still existed.

Various sources seems to claim that the minimum VRAM requirement for Hogwarts Legacy is 4GB and recommended being 8GB. Seems to still be far away from 24GB.

I could totally imagine a big map game having 50gb+ of textures, and demand loading them. If you have more VRAM, there will be less SSD reading/writing as textures are loaded and unloaded when you move about the map.

UE4 onwards has this interesting mechanism where it slows movement as you move through a zone that triggers asset loading. It removes loading screens by imposing a movement speed penalty to give it time to pre-load assets.

The pitfall is that if you're short on VRAM you can feel like you're moving through treacle near doors you don't even intend to open! All at 60fps...

That seems so much worse than the oft memed about "glacially slow elevators" or, more recently, "tiny gaps your character crawls through"

GPUs are going to have SSDs or NAND soon, aren't they? "Non-volatile persistent texture storage" branded as "TextureFlash" or "GameNOW!!" or something like that.

I for one absolutely love this idea.

I disagree as technologies like DirectStorage and equiv. mature and are adopted.

In addition, undersized vram amounts is one of the ways in which Nvidia limits the usable life of their video cards.

The 24GB VRAM also comes with a ~$2000 price tag. That's not really a regular gamer level card.

I don't know a single person who had a 6MB 3Dfx Voodoo card back in the day, I know plenty of people with a 24GB VRAM card today. I don't think they (6MB 3Dfx) were even obtainable in my country at the time without special contacts. So by any measure, those cards were not really regular gamer level cards either.

They were defini6tely uncommon but 6MB Voodoos were only a little bit more than regular 4MB cards here in the USA. ~$350 instead of ~$300 I think.

I knew approximately 6 or 7 people with 3D graphics cards back then. And 2 of us had the 6MB Voodoo cards.

But then again it was just a very different time in 1997. Video games were already 20+ years old in the mainstream at that point. But the idea of buying a special "3D graphics card" for your PC was still pretty new. So if you were "crazy" enough to do that in the first place then spending another $50 on the "best" card was a fairly common decision.

Video editing will use all of that and more.

Indeed, so will 3D rendering and other things. Besides the point though.

Today the extra VRAM gets you a degree of futureproofing.

Theoretically the extra VRAM on a 3Dfx Voodoo did that as well. But in reality not really. 3D accelerators were blossoming so quickly that old cards were obsoleted, fast.

Probably even more relevantly, games didn't have as many tweakable graphics options. Today's games are multiplatform and built to run on a wide variety of spec'd devices, from PS4/XBOne era hardware up to superpowered gaming PCs. If I've got an older card with lots of memory running a newer game I can keep everything else at medium and bump texture quality to high. Games in 1997 generally weren't really built quite that flexibly.

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