RAM Usage Best Practices

Fundamentals

Checking RAM usage

You can use the following in-game tool to identify issues:

1. Start the game in Direct X (this tool doesn’t work in Vulkan yet)
2. Open Performance Graph ( Ctrl+Shift+F) → GPU Memory Profiling
3. Make sure to enable Update Data settings under General tab
   
4. Search for vehicle:Texture
   

Additionally, for a more detailed view:

1. Navigate to GPU Memory Profiling tab
2. Open GFX Texture Objects within
3. Expand Filter menu
4. Select vehicle and deselect everything else in the list to see additional data
   

Common Issues

Problem We have super high GPU RAM usage and need to reduce it, target is below 300mb.
Solution Reduce Texture sizes to fit, can use the new creative texture tiling as well to keep texture density.

Problem Sometimes, we add parts that use only 1% of these huge texture sets.
Solution For example, before we added an antenna to a vehicle, it called for the entire offroad part texture set into RAM, even though the vehicle only needed to use a few pixels from it.

Other common issues:

• AO maps are often unnecessarily high-res. Since they’re soft and lack sharp details, they can be downscaled significantly without visual loss.
• Clear coat maps (cc.data) are usually subtle or even duplicates of opacity maps, making high resolution not needed, or completely un necessary.
• Metallic and roughness maps are typically simple but still at very high resolutions. These can often be reduced, especially since higher-resolution textures like normals can mask lower-res artifacts. Example below is a metallic map that can be downscaled a lot because there is no detail.