Yeah but a PC with a 970 will always be superior to a PS4. Forever. Anything a PS4 runs should be able to run on a 970, with enough headroom for extra bells and whistles even.
Your argument would stand for a 960. Even that card is more powerful that a PS4 but with 2GB is indeed very limited. A 970 has 4GB though. I highly doubt the PS4 uses more memory than that for textures and graphics alone.
A 970 effectively has 3.5GB VRAM.
I have a 1070 which has 8.2GB VRAM, and did some testing since I have a save at a point in the game where I can run around all the locations.
The only two settings which have a significant impact on VRAM are the shadow quality and texture resolution options.
And unfortunately anything less than very high shadows does indeed look terrible.
That's something they really need to fix with an update. It seems like they're not being filtered properly.
So if we assume that shadow quality must be set to very high, that leaves texture resolution as the only other variable we have.
At 1080p, the highest VRAM usage that I saw in my testing, ±100MB was:
- Very Low: 3.3GB
- Low: 3.8GB
- Medium: 4.4GB
- High: 7.9GB
- Very High: 7.9GB
Perhaps someone with a 12GB Titan could confirm, but it doesn't actually seem like very high is hitting the limits of my 1070 as I never saw it reach 8GB usage. It just seemed to be more consistently high, in the range of 7.5-7.9GB on Very High rather than 7.1-7.9GB on High.
Contrary to the "poor optimization" claims, the game actually seemed to be very good at memory management, with memory usage seemingly having a set target that it would stay within ±100MB for everything but the highest settings where it seemed to vary a bit more. I assume that means not every texture in the game has higher than "medium" resolution available.
So with a 970, I would hesitate to use medium resolution textures, and even low would be questionable due to that slow 0.5GB the card has.
If they improve the shadow quality in a patch so that lower quality levels are a viable option, that might enable the use of higher resolution textures, but right now I would only reduce the shadow quality if you have 3GB VRAM or less.