• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

Digital Foundry: Diablo 4 PC - A Great Game but VRAM/Textures Are Problematic

Two thoughts.

What's it like on Xbox with less than 16GB of ram?
16GB of ram on PS5 is unified between GPU and CPU. So why would the GPU that isn't shared also need a full 16GB?
 
Two thoughts.

What's it like on Xbox with less than 16GB of ram?
16GB of ram on PS5 is unified between GPU and CPU. So why would the GPU that isn't shared also need a full 16GB?
A. DF only tested 16gb and 8gb gpus. They have no clue of how it performs with 10gb or 12gb vram, that paraphrasing was misleading.
B. There are suspicions of memory leaks in the game
C. Some benchmarks and users in this thread report the game running fine on 8gb at ultra, the issue could be CPU related as DF paired the 2080 with a r5 3600.
 
Last edited:
This is from the OP.
Remarkably, only a 16GB GPU can match the visual quality of the PlayStation 5 version.

How do you think that came to be on a supposedly 12 GB console?

Bad port? Memory leak?

You're really trying to benchmark an architecture with a game that peoples are detecting memory leaks on?

Stupidity Are You Stupid GIF
 
A. DF only tested 16gb and 8gb gpus. They have no clue of how it performs with 10gb or 12gb vram, that paraphrasing was misleading.
B. There are suspicions of memory leaks in the game
C. Some benchmarks and users in this thread report the game running fine on 8gb at ultra, the issue could be CPU related as DF paired the 2080 with a r5 3600.
Two people here with 3080 10gb are having the same problem with ultra texture. DF should have tested 10gb and 12gb gpu too but 10gb is the same.
 
Two people here with 3080 10gb are having the same problem with ultra texture. DF should have tested 10gb and 12gb gpu too but 10gb is the same.
And some people are having no issues even with 8gb. Theres something else going on here. You should also consider the people who were having problems here could've been connection related.
 
Last edited:
Firstly - Motherboards and RAM configuration make a difference here as well and need to be specified for comparisons (in addition to CPU and VRAM pool).

Secondly - those that hold on to that "8GB should be enough it needs to be a memory leak" crowd have not thought this through. High-resolution textures take up a lot of memory and VRAM quickly becomes a bottle-neck. I am personally very happy regarding the increase in texture amount and resolution but it really pushes cards with smaller VRAM pools hard.

Note: This does not exclude memory leaks but I think that is less likely than I/O (CPU+motherboard+RAM) and VRAM bottlenecks.
 
Note: This does not exclude memory leaks but I think that is less likely than I/O (CPU+motherboard+RAM) and VRAM bottlenecks.
Its much more likely the game is being cpu bound. Here's the game running on a RTX 3060 and a RTX 3060 ti, buttery smooth.
Only difference to DF's video is that they're running on much better CPUs than the r5 3600






Most they got here was small stutter in town at higher resolutions (nowhere near as bad as what DF got however). Theres also some weird issue with character inventory menus drastically decreasing fps for some reason.
 
Last edited:
Bad port? Memory leak?

You're really trying to benchmark an architecture with a game that peoples are detecting memory leaks on?

Stupidity Are You Stupid GIF
It's not even that. The ps5 version runs at 1296p. Going from 1440p to 4k has a big hit on the vram. Not sure about this game but is typically in the 1.5-2gb range. 1296p is even lower than 1440p.

Hell in the other thread we were wondering why the ps5 was only at 1296p when equivalent gpus were easily hitting Native 4k, well now we know. No vram. They chose textures over resolution but cerny's secret sauce didn't let them do both.
 
It's not even that. The ps5 version runs at 1296p. Going from 1440p to 4k has a big hit on the vram. Not sure about this game but is typically in the 1.5-2gb range. 1296p is even lower than 1440p.

Hell in the other thread we were wondering why the ps5 was only at 1296p when equivalent gpus were easily hitting Native 4k, well now we know. No vram. They chose textures over resolution but cerny's secret sauce didn't let them do both.

4K doesn't explain 16GB though, 14GB for 1080p would still be anormal for a game that looks like this. It's more taxing than Microsoft flight sim and plague tale requiem at 4K, doesn't make sense
 
It's not even that. The ps5 version runs at 1296p. Going from 1440p to 4k has a big hit on the vram. Not sure about this game but is typically in the 1.5-2gb range. 1296p is even lower than 1440p.

Hell in the other thread we were wondering why the ps5 was only at 1296p when equivalent gpus were easily hitting Native 4k, well now we know. No vram. They chose textures over resolution but cerny's secret sauce didn't let them do both.
if it is 1296p upscaled to 4k output (temporally), it will still have 4k-like vram consumption.

you can try witcher 3 ray tracing at 4k with dlss ultra performance mode. it is internal 720p, yet it will still destroy VRAM (9 gb+ usage).

I can play 1440p DLAA with ray tracing at 6.5 GB-7 VRAM consumption

but I cannot play 4K upscaling with dlss ultra performance. it literally pushes the vram to max (i saw 8100 mb usage) and starts to drop frames horrendously.

internal resolution doesn't really mean much anymore.

i dont know how many times I have to repeat this...
 
Last edited:
It's not even that. The ps5 version runs at 1296p. Going from 1440p to 4k has a big hit on the vram. Not sure about this game but is typically in the 1.5-2gb range. 1296p is even lower than 1440p.

Hell in the other thread we were wondering why the ps5 was only at 1296p when equivalent gpus were easily hitting Native 4k, well now we know. No vram. They chose textures over resolution but cerny's secret sauce didn't let them do both.

Keep in mind it's 1296 using FSR2 to reach 4K, on PC using FSR or DLSS also renders the game at lower resolutions, and upscaling isn't free.
 
4K doesn't explain 16GB though, 14GB for 1080p would still be anormal for a game that looks like this. It's more taxing than Microsoft flight sim and plague tale requiem at 4K, doesn't make sense
Apart from it being a memory leak, could just be how the game alocates memory. Users with 20gb+ cards say the game maxes out vram for them too.
 
"only a 16GB GPU can match the visual quality of the PlayStation 5 version"

Damn ps5 u beast, as usual
 
Keep in mind it's 1296 using FSR2 to reach 4K, on PC using FSR or DLSS also renders the game at lower resolutions, and upscaling isn't free.
Dlss quality, which they are using to test the 2080, renders the game at 1440p. So still higher than ps5's.

In general, this video felt really poorly done. No 10gb or 12gb tests despite them having concerns over vram limitations, no CPU related tests, no addressing potential memory leaks some users were having. It will cause more confusion than help. Before this, the only complaints i'd see over performance were connection related, now suddenly its vram and stutter chaos again.
 
Last edited:
if it is 1296p upscaled to 4k output (temporally), it will still have 4k-like vram consumption.

you can try witcher 3 ray tracing at 4k with dlss ultra performance mode. it is internal 720p, yet it will still destroy VRAM (9 gb+ usage).

I can play 1440p DLAA with ray tracing at 6.5 GB-7 VRAM consumption

but I cannot play 4K upscaling with dlss ultra performance. it literally pushes the vram to max (i saw 8100 mb usage) and starts to drop frames horrendously.

internal resolution doesn't really mean much anymore.

i dont know how many times I have to repeat this...
I don't know if this is true. Both of us played tlou recently and we settled for dlss over native to reduce vram consumption.

I will go back and check re4 and hogwarts as well. Dlss definitely reduces vram usage.

Keep in mind it's 1296 using FSR2 to reach 4K, on PC using FSR or DLSS also renders the game at lower resolutions, and upscaling isn't free.
Its not free on the gpu but definitely saves on vram. I will run some tests.
 
Dlss quality, which they are using to test the 2080, renders the game at 1440p. So still higher than ps5's.
Right, that's the raw pixel counts but then we also have to factor that the consoles are running Ultra equivalent settings, for textures at least and I would hazard other things too.

Which makes the consoles running this with near flawless performance all the more impressive as well.

In general, Blizzard have optimized the shit out of the consoles here.
 
Last edited:
I don't know if this is true. Both of us played tlou recently and we settled for dlss over native to reduce vram consumption.

I will go back and check re4 and hogwarts as well. Dlss definitely reduces vram usage.


Its not free on the gpu but definitely saves on vram. I will run some tests.
Both DLSS and any temporal upscaler will reduce VRAM pressure/VRAM consumption. BUT! not to native levels.

I'm not saying they do not. but it is not that big as you imagine it is.

say the game's VRAM load at native 4k is 12 GB. with 4k dlss performance, you're looking at around 9-10 GB usage.

how about native 1440p? most likely around 7-8 GB. just guessing. I will do some experiments in Cyberpunk and return back to you.
 
Both DLSS and any temporal upscaler will reduce VRAM pressure/VRAM consumption. BUT! not to native levels.

I'm not saying they do not. but it is not that big as you imagine it is.

say the game's VRAM load at native 4k is 12 GB. with 4k dlss performance, you're looking at around 9-10 GB usage.

how about native 1440p? most likely around 7-8 GB. just guessing. I will do some experiments in Cyberpunk and return back to you.
But isn't that what i said. 1.5-2 gb. That makes a huge difference on consoles that have 12.5-13.5 gb of vram.

I think re4 will be a more accurate test since it has fsr instead of dlss. I will try it tonight. Otherwise I'm not sure why the consoles arent even using fsr quality and have to settle for balanced. His 2080 tests proves that this game is vram bound.
 
But isn't that what i said. 1.5-2 gb. That makes a huge difference on consoles that have 12.5-13.5 gb of vram.

I think re4 will be a more accurate test since it has fsr instead of dlss. I will try it tonight. Otherwise I'm not sure why the consoles arent even using fsr quality and have to settle for balanced. His 2080 tests proves that this game is vram bound.
each game is different also. some games will prefer more buffers at native, some will prefer less. this is why the impact of DLSS in games vary. rdr2 for example leaves so much buffer at native resolution to a point you get very marginal performance improvements at quality levels (and still end up with dithering problems xd)

some people expect drastic reductions from DLSS. 1.5 2 gb might not be it.

in the end, consoles have pure VRAM to games. do remember that 10 GB is on PC can be considered 9 gb AND 12 gb on PC can be considered 11.4-11.6 GB.

this also changes a lot of things. both reviewers and people keep ignoring this.

even battle.net by default uses a fair bit of amount of VRAM on a 4K desktop :messenger_grinning: and of course DWM itself. DF needs to educate themselves (they're not aware of this since they usually play on 24 gb gpus daily) and their community.

people act like 10-12 GB can be purely dedicated to video games. not possible... but some games are extra dumb and only use fixed percentage of what you have as VRAM. (diablo4 is not one of them thankfully)

there's also shadowplay which will easily gobble up 300-600 mb on any given day if you're using replay feature (most of the casual users use them programs)


here are findings

native 4k 6.77 gb vram (13.54)
4k fsr performance 5.74 gb vram (11.48)
4k fsr balanced 5.67 gb vram (11.34 - 13.5 gb budget consoles can fit this but 12 GB can barely squueze in)
"native 1440p" 5.35 gb vram (10.7 - this is where 12 GB cards can feel 'safe')
"native 1080p" 5 gb vram

as you can see there's a vram reduction but it is somewhere between the middle, but still higher than "native 1440p". even 4k fsr performance still demands more VRAM than native 1440p.

there's a reason NVIDIA positions 10-12 GB for 1440p. 1440p buffers require much much less VRAM, and even less so with DLSS on top.

4K is where you will really need 16 gb going forward. there's no two ways about it
 
Last edited:
Firstly - Motherboards and RAM configuration make a difference here as well and need to be specified for comparisons (in addition to CPU and VRAM pool).

Secondly - those that hold on to that "8GB should be enough it needs to be a memory leak" crowd have not thought this through. High-resolution textures take up a lot of memory and VRAM quickly becomes a bottle-neck. I am personally very happy regarding the increase in texture amount and resolution but it really pushes cards with smaller VRAM pools hard.

Note: This does not exclude memory leaks but I think that is less likely than I/O (CPU+motherboard+RAM) and VRAM bottlenecks.
Well, something many people don't even take into consideration is that textures ultra quality is mostly expected to be used with 4K resolution, so it's normal that it's a VRAM black hole for 1080p targeted 8gb cards.

Imo problem with this game and TLOU is that medium and high textures should go in hand with that too so they don't look awful at lower settings. I always pick High instead of ultra I'm everything, never had an issue with any PC game aside from when I had Nvidia, then if I have enough headroom in performance, I'll go for Ultra textures since I have 12 GB VRAM
 
Last edited:
I'm running the game at 4k DLAA ultra everything.. Frame Generation OFF.. Locked 120hrz

Ram usage is around ~15gb don't use chrome.. Use Firefox if needed with alt tabbing. Chrome tabs hog all the ram.

Vram usage is around ~18gb

Cpu usage is around ~25-30%

4090
7950x
32gb Ddr5 6000
 
This is why I bought it on my PS5 instead of my PC (3080Ti) constant troubleshooting and numbers and combos with this or that. Literally just takes away from the experience.

This thread is a great example.
 
Last edited:
It's a shame that there are VRAM issues as the actual performance is outrageously high. I know it's not the best looking game but it runs like greased lightning.

It took running it at 5120x2880 to get it to drop below 100fps without DLSS or frame generation. Lots of headroom if they really do add some RT post launch.

Not sure what the bottleneck on console is for it to drop frames from 60fps (albeit rarely per VG Tech) at only 1296p as I'm at over 6.5x the number of pixels - maybe occasionally CPU bound on those Zen 2 CPUs or maybe memory management not perfect on console either. Still 60fps with ultra settings is very nice.

Maybe some tweaking needed but everyone seems to get a good enough experience out of the box - even the Xbox One version looked ok considering how handicapped that machine is.
 
16GB of ram on PS5 is unified between GPU and CPU. So why would the GPU that isn't shared also need a full 16GB?
Because on PC you need to copy some things between main RAM and VRAM unless you have direct storage support. It depends what your game is doing.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom