As players consider GPU purchases, should they expect VRAM usage to keep increasing as the game is developed?

That's an interesting one. So we've had to be quite careful in the past with the amount of video memory used. We have backers that backed early on that don't have quite so powerful GPUs. They don't hold us back; we're just trying to make sure that we don't rule them out of the game. So we've been quite smart in how we've used the memory, and we make sure that they're still able to run the game. Obviously, the performance will not be as good on their machines. So yeah, I think with three to four gigs, you can run the game quite comfortably and get decent visuals. And I think around the four-gig region will stay running the game quite nicely for quite some time. I don't think there's a technology reason why the minimum needs to increase. But what will happen is we have all these different pools of memory: how much is used for textures, how much is used for geometry, and so on. And the core amount of memory you need to run everything without textures or without meshes is increasing over time. And eventually, out of your four gigs, if we end up with three gigs to do the bare basics, then your one gig left won't give you a lot of textures and a lot of geometry. You'll still be able to run the game, but eventually, yeah, you'll start getting diminishing returns. And there's elements of that already. When we added planets, gas clouds, these things all took up memory. I think the gas clouds budget is like 300 megs, 400 megs or something. So that has to come from somewhere. And if your machine doesn't have it, you're getting less of something to pay for that. Now, one thing we are going to do with Gen12: as a necessity of the way Vulkan works, the memory management is much more explicit. Basically, rather than DirectX or NVIDIA or Intel managing the memory for you, it's left largely to yourself as a developer. But as a result of that, we are much more strict with how we use the memory. And what we're going to do is what a few other games have done, which is expose that to you in the advanced graphics options so you can see exactly what memory you're using and balance that as you see fit. So if you want more texture memory, then you will sacrifice something else. That's your choice. And you can see how we're adapting, rather than it being hidden from you, which it slightly is at the moment. And the other thing that a lot of people maybe don't realize is the resolution you run the game at has a huge impact on the memory. So when I'm saying 4 gigs is OK, if you're trying to run the game at 8K or 4K widescreen or something, you are taking a huge amount of memory for the bare bones of just getting the screen rendered, without any geometry or textures in there. So you leave very little room for that. So if we expose it to you and show it to you, it'll be much more clear, and people that don't have as much memory will be able to make a smarter decision on how they want to use it, if they're interested. Obviously, we'll have automatic settings that do our best job. But yeah, should you want to delve into that, [you can]. So to answer the question, yes, VRAM usage will steadily increase. But I don't think our minimum will increase for a while. I think it will be quite stable for quite some time. Especially at the 4GB region, it's going to be OK. But yeah, we definitely want to be able to push to 8 more eventually. And we need to, because for example, the consoles have significantly more memory than 4GB, and we need to be beating them. We need to use it, but we just need to keep something in reserve for the 4GB people.