Is the Texture Quality settings GPU depended ?

[BuBu Shofronea]

I just cannot find my words to describe this. As far as i know it is but there is an issue about this :
I'm packed with an gtx 750 and i tried to do the following things on some mid-end games, which aren't heavy load for my graphics card. I set the texture quality to high and all the other things to the lowest and in all the games i've tested this i've got some serious stuttering and lag spikes, making them unplayable, but if i set the texture to the lowest and then set the others to max, i'm going for a constant and smoothly 60 FPS. Why i asked if there's GPU depended is because my cpu is way weaker than my gpu and i'm just wondering if the texture quality isn't more handled by the hdd, idk, i just don't understand why this happenes. I also use a decent resolution, 1440x900.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Make it easy on yourself. Download GeForce Experience at let it configure the settings for all your games.

 

[doubletake]

Whether or not high texture settings will cause stuttering depends on a couple of things, namely how much RAM you have and how fast the disk the textures are streaming off of is. Anytime your GPU's memory is saturated, it has to swap data from system memory. If you have enough system memory (8+GB) and a suitably fast drive (preferably an SSD), you might get be able to avoid heavy stuttering. This varies from game to game though.

One important thing you left out is if you have the 1 or 2GB version of the 750. 1GB is BARELY enough even for your low resolution in modern games. The 2GB, however, will be just fine.

 

[Solandri]

What doubletake said, except he means VRAM, not RAM. Your system RAM doesn't really matter for textures (unless you're using integrated video).

The vast majority of your video card's VRAM is consumed by textures. The models, frambuffers, etc usually only take up a few MB each. A big texture by itself (say 2048x2048) is 16 MB with alpha channel. Then the video card has to generate smaller versions of it for mip mapping (smaller versions of the texture used on stuff that's further away, since it would be a waste of time to map the entire 2048x2048 texture onto something that's only 100 pixels wide on your screen). And it has to do this for every texture. Not just the ones that are being displayed, but the ones that might be displayed - you don't want the screen to freeze while the computer has to load a new texture off the HDD just because you spun the camera around.

That's precisely what happens when you run out of VRAM. The video card can't keep every texture which might appear in VRAM. So it has to drop one texture. When you run around in the game and happen to need that texture, the card has to drop another texture to free up VRAM, and load that texture again. All this takes time, which you see as stuttering and lagging. Turning down the texture quality reduces the amount of VRAM the textures consume, allowing the card to keep all the textures it needs in VRAM.