Are there any plans in the future to dynamically use more VRAM for cards that have it available? For example, the game seems to use 6 GB on my 3090, but I have 24 GB available. Also, would more VRAM usage allow for better frames or higher quality textures?

Yes. So the first thing I'd say is you don't want to use 24 gigs just because you can. You want to use what you need. But the question is, what quality improvements could we make, which way could we use those 24 gigs? At the moment, the system basically assumes it wants to achieve the resolution you ask for. So if you ask for 4K, it's going to spend a lot of memory achieving 4K. It looks at what memory it's got left on your graphics card, and it says, OK, I'll use all that's left on the meshes and textures. And it will scale up the texture budget to about three or four gigs; I think that's the internal limit of how much it'll use on textures. We could uncap that three-gig limit and put it to 100 gigs or whatever, and it'll just try and load all the textures in the game for you. The only reason we haven't really uncapped that is it doesn't usually lead to any visual improvement. Three gigabytes tends to get you every single texture we have on screen loaded at the highest quality we have available. So raising it just risks a little bit. We might get some streaming issues where your hard drive just starts churning away. And maybe you've got a fast hard drive, it's OK. But maybe you don't have such a fast hard drive, and you're wondering why the game runs slow, because it's trying to load the 24 gigs of textures you've asked for, which you don't really need. That's the situation today. Where we want to be, though, once we've finished Gen 12, is to expose some of these numbers to the player instead. So you pick your resolution, and it shows you how much memory is left, and you pick how much texture resolution you want to use. And then you can down-res, up-res. And then if you want to hang yourself and put 24 gigs of textures, maybe it does look better, maybe it doesn't, but we'll give that to the user to pick how they distribute the memory. One thing that would be nice, which we can't promise, but it is definitely a future option, is to have a high-res texture pack. We author all of our textures at double the resolution we actually ship them at, but there's several issues in trying to achieve that at the moment, mainly that the size of the build would obviously go enormously high, and that has costs associated with it as well on the back-end side; there's some money. So we also have some tasks in the pipeline to reduce the size of the build. This is stuff that's a higher-level decision than we can make in our team. But maybe if we have the textures available and we have the technology to use them, and we also save a bunch of memory on the build, maybe we get to a point where it's more viable to have a high-res texture pack. And then the people that do have 20 gigs or whatever of memory will have a very real reason to use that memory. If you, say, doubled the resolution of every texture, that would be four times the texture memory. So our 3-gig texture limit might go to 12 gigs instead, at least. So 12 gigs, once you add on 4K and a few other things, you easily get to 16 to 20 gigs of memory. So this is something in the future, definitely. There are some technologies as well in the future that we might use that could eat up some of that memory, things like ray tracing and SDFs, distance fields that are used for various pieces of technology. These all consume extra memory. We just have to make sure the game can still scale so that the people that have six gigs or whatever can still run the game sensibly.

You understand I have to put everything ultra max, right? All the sliders got to go up, Ali. Not worth playing if I can't max everything out.

Well, interestingly, a lot of old games used to let you max out beyond what your GPU could do. I think some games now have taken the approach that we're talking about here, where if you max them all out, it will not let you. If you want to run your game at 8K and have all the textures loaded in the world, it's not going to happen. There's no space physically there. So it will force you to live within the constraints of your GPU.