James Ross, on 09 April 2013 - 08:48 AM, said:
In general, though, there should be no side effects, but remember the configuration may not be supported by the CLR so there could always be issues. It can't hurt to try, anyway.
However, in this case, the VM is only getting up to ~1100MB so the likelihood of it making any difference here is slim.
Although we detect the VRAM, we make no use of this in our loading patterns currently. We load everything in the "tile space" (current tile and the 8 around it) and that's it.
There is nothing in OR (or should certainly not be!) that unloads/loads things based on viewing direction. If there is, it's a bug. That does make the video a little puzzling. I believe I have seen reports that ATI cards are more aggressive at unloading "unused" VRAM and are known to often have lots of stuttering when rotating the camera in open-world style games (I've personally seen it with World of Warcraft and it's pretty bad sometimes). While that may not be everything going on here, I'd suspect it of not helping.
If you haven't already, make sure you're on the latest graphics card drivers too, just in case. :p
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm........... , I will have to give this a test on both my systems. I have long had the feeling that the NVidia card (One system has a NVidia GTX560SOC the other a Radeon 5870) does a good deal better job on OR than the the 5870. As you mentioned "stuttering" is a major problem with the radeon. I will check this though, i have not run the NVidia system much recently as the fans in the case keep giving problems and have yet to fix this issue.