With many modern GPUs supporting 12GB–24GB of VRAM, it makes sense to provide a 16GB Texture Streaming Budget option in Apex Legends. This will allow for better texture quality, fewer visual artifacts, and an overall smoother experience for those who can support it. The option doesn’t force players to use it but gives those with powerful GPUs the ability to maximize their experience.
It would be nice to have the option, though realistically, it won't really make a difference performance-wise.
All this setting really changes is the maximum amount of VRAM that can be allocated for the texture streaming pool.
Increasing the max amount of the streaming pool won't really make it use up more in minimum conditions.
I've just tested with it set to the max setting of 8GB of VRAM, and on Kings Canyon it's mostly using up 3.3GB of VRAM.
Assuming I would encounter a lot of other users & particles, I could see it going up to 6, though even hitting 8 would seem like quite the task.
Currently (From what I've seen), Apex uses a lot of textures that usually are around 1024x1024, but some textures are 2048x2048.
I cannot really see how those textures are used, but with textures around those resolutions, I don't think they would be hitting the cap of 8GB anytime soon.
Unless they decide to make higher quality textures (Which I believe would be unlikely due to the game focusing mostly on it's competitiveness), it would seem unecessarry to increase it.
You could change the texture streaming budget manually, but I cannot confirm if this actually works since the game never really takes up that memory to begin with.
Inside of this folder: %userprofile%\Saved Games\Respawn\Apex\local you will find the videoconfig.txt that contains most of your video settings.
Inside of this file, you can find the texture streaming budget under this setting: "setting.stream_memory"
I have not been able to find out how these values exactly correspond to the amount of VRAM that's being taken up, though this is what I did find out:
2gb = 160000
2-3gb = 300000
3gb = 600000
4gb = 1000000
6gb = 2000000
8gb = 3000000
I want to add that I play at 299 FPS on a 300Hz display at 1440p, and I hit 7.5GB of VRAM usage along with 26GB of system memory usage just in the firing range. I’m not completely sure, but I think textures are being loaded into system RAM first and then transferred to VRAM to compensate for the 8GB cap. This could explain the high system memory usage, if the game is holding texture data in RAM instead of keeping everything in VRAM, it might be a workaround for the limited texture streaming budget.
I don’t know for sure, but it’s a hunch. If that's the case, then increasing the cap to 16GB could allow the game to store more textures directly in VRAM, reducing system RAM usage and potentially improving texture streaming efficiency.
