What settings/types of levels are most vram demanding?

[invictius]

I dropped resolution and didn't have a drop in vram use. Msi afterburner is being a bit flakey on this system so I'm having trouble measuring some of the obvious things like resolution increase, lots of actors, what happens with complex gzdoom map objects (Such as The Given). Recommendations for alternatives to this program are welcome, especially if there's something where I can simply click which settings I want on the osd (msi requires grouping settings with a name even though this grouping/naming is not relevant to what's displayed onscreen)

[InsanityBringer]

Resolution is only a small part of vram usage, since all that influences is how much memory the framebuffer + any other needed screen size buffers use. They can get large at very high resolution, like a 32-bit framebuffer at 4k can reach over 30 MB, but that's only a small drop even in older cards with 2-4GB vram. The rest of vram is dominated by basically anything else. All textures loaded at the moment, all the map geometry, models that are being used (both polygonal and voxel, since voxels are converted into polygonal models), transform data for the camera and each object, and a few other things all require VRAM, so basically including anything will increase the amount used. More map geometry will add more data, more complicated sectors will need to be tessellated with more faces. More objects will probably not be a huge increase on their own, but if there is a larger variety of different objects, that will pull in more textures and vertex data if models are used. Having more textures used on the map and possibly in view can add up quickly. I don't know if GZDoom does anything to evict lesser-used textures if data is tight.

One way of potentially greatly increasing memory usage is the high quality resize modes. If you make all the textures 4x bigger in both axes, that's 16x the data that needs to be stored overall. From what I've seen people mention before, this can add up extremely fast.