DSOGaming: On September 4th, you announced the PC system requirements for Ryse: Son of Rome. A lot of our readers were troubled about the recommended VRAM requirement (4GB of VRAM). According to Marcel Hatam, however, 4GB of VRAM are recommended for 4K gaming. So what kind of GPU (and VRAM) will PC gamers need for 1080p at max settings?
Nicolas Schulz: That depends a lot on what framerate you want to achieve. For 60 FPS you will definitely need a high-end GPU. For 30 FPS our recommended GPU configurations will be sufficient. Regarding VRAM, we adjust our texture pool based on the available graphics memory. While the maximum pool size is used with 3 GB of VRAM, 2 GB are enough to achieve great quality. Below that, we have to downscale some of the heavy textures a bit.
DSOGaming: Ryse: Son of Rome was timed exclusive to Xbox One and ran at 900p and 30fps. The PC version, on the other hand, will support 4K and 60fps. Do you believe that current-gen consoles (Xbox One and PS4) are far behind high-end PCs? And did Xbox One limit the things you could achieve with Ryse? Would the game look more beautiful and more impressive if it was developed as a PC exclusive title as the original Crysis was back in the days?
Nicolas Schulz: The current generation of high-end GPUs is unfortunately still far from being able to reach 60 FPS at 4K resolution. Please keep in mind that with 4K versus 1080p, you have four times the amount of pixels that need to be shaded. This is very quickly saturating the available bandwidth. The consoles are clearly behind high-spec GPUs in terms of raw horsepower, however on the positive side, they share the same modern architecture which enables a wealth of interesting optimization techniques. Due to the console differences we had to work a bit harder on the final optimizations but I’m happy that we never had to sacrifice any visual quality.
muh optimierung
