<blockquote> when I tested with all shader off and on 1024x768 resolution, Vram was still at 100% when I entered the sim</blockquote><p><br />Vast, vast majority of video-ram is used to hold the textures, not the actual render-target buffers – even 4k-24bpp, 3840x2160x3 is only about 25MB … even with triple-buffering and dual monitors, it would only be 150MB. (Also, if I understand the hardware architecture correctly, it’s very specialized, physically separate little ram chips that hold these scanout buffers.)<br /><br />On my 6GB 1660 Ti system, I don’t observe any difference in vram usage, in response to tree and grass sliders… I expect there may be some random variation, depending on what Windows and other apps are doing in the background.<br /><br />But honestly, I don’t fully understand what happens when one doesn’t have “enough” dedicated vram … I understand the gpu can still pull texture data from shared system ram, over the PCI bus… but I don’t have a sense for how badly that impacts rendering performance… or if it’s somehow “smart”, ie. using the dedicated vram as a sort of giant L3 cache for the most frequently accessed textures? (that might result in stutters when there are cache misses … if so, that might be noticeable, eg. if you suddenly turn your head to look behind you)</p>