When the graphics settings need more memory than the graphics card has, the OS moves textures out to system memory and brings them back, and the game stutters.
Why High texture settings plus all the gear and effects in a crowded place fill up graphics card memory → Effect The OS moves textures that aren’t in use right now to system memory, then brings them back over the slow PCIe bus when needed → On screen A hitch every time a new scene or character comes into view; textures stay blurry for a while
When crowds gather, While moving or changing zones
Owner
Primary owner Game team (Client development) · Also External (External)
Game team action items
Set default options to match graphics card memory size, lower texture quality automatically when the memory budget is exceeded, simplify character textures in crowded places.
External action items
Tell players to lower texture settings, and to lower them further when running two clients.
Ballpark numbers
Graphics card memory reads hundreds of GB per second, but the PCIe bus to system memory carries roughly 16–64 GB per second depending on the generation, more than ten times slower.
On the graph
Hits a ceiling · Dedicated GPU memory, shared GPU memory
Where to look
Watch the Dedicated GPU memory and Shared GPU memory graphs under GPU on Task Manager’s Performance tab (per-process columns can also be added on the Details tab) alongside PresentMon frame time
Confirmed if
Hitches are frequent while dedicated GPU memory sits flat at its limit and shared GPU memory grows, and they go away when texture settings are lowered
Ruled out if
Dedicated memory has headroom: “Slow storage delays asset streaming” or “Synchronous loading and shader compilation on the main thread”
Check with
The player’s own environment
Learn more
If “Dedicated GPU memory” under GPU in Windows Task Manager is full and “Shared GPU memory” keeps growing, this is what’s happening. Running two clients on the same PC fills it faster (see “Streaming failure from memory or VRAM shortage”).
Sources
ResidencyMicrosoft Each process has a graphics memory budget; when it’s exceeded, the kernel moves part of the discrete GPU’s heap to system memory (a last resort, so managing the budget is recommended)
GPUs in the task managerMicrosoft In Task Manager, dedicated GPU memory is the graphics card’s VRAM, and shared GPU memory is system memory used by both the GPU and the CPU
CUDA C++ Best Practices GuideNVIDIA Graphics memory bandwidth (V100: 898 GB/s) is far higher than PCIe 3.0 x16 (16 GB/s), so it recommends minimizing transfers to and from system memory