Interesting bench.
@ zapatista: it is still popping up due to lods. If lods are popping earlier you will again have a rising vram usage in general. So I think, that the engine was tweaked for lower vram. The popups are in its nature and it would use more than 3 gb vram to solve that problem down to a sufficient or not seeable level.
Hickups could still rise up, as the vram frequently get new data. So hickups could be caused by every storage part: hdd too slow, bad ram usage profile and vram interface insufficient. All problems are still there and the vram issue is noticable on nvidia cards, as they still use a bad vram interface. And especially in that game, this is a con! In most other games you do not need a bigger interface, except you have modded texture sets. There u can see again, that an engine like clod or cry engine could use huge amount of vram, but also needs the power of the interface. That is, why ati cards are quite good performing in cry engine (especially with texture mods), streaming engines (arma, clod) and in higher resolutions.
So I think, that they tweaked the engine to reach better playability with all cards, getting lower vram usage. And that is done with some essential rewritings of the engine (i have no doubt, that they tried to rewrite some parts), but also lowering lod, effects, visuals, etc...
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