Sorry about a rookie question. I'm still puzzled by how exactly VRAM is used by Skryim and other games. For what I know "oldrim" can only use 4Gb of video ram, but what does it do with it?
1 - What's stored in VRAM at any given moment? Stuff like assets, textures, and what else? Or is it used to store the processed output of the rendering engine?
2 - If assets get stored in VRAM, are they kept there permanently? I mean, does the game load them at startup and keep them there for quicker usage? Or do the contents of VRAM get replaced/refreshed during the game? Does the game try to keep all assets permanently in VRAM or just the ones used in rendering (the current cell and immediate cells)?
3 - How can we criteriously lighten the load on VRAM - which assets have the most impact, and which won't make any difference if we change their resolution?
4 - What relative impact do new assets vs. asset replacers like textures and high poly meshes? Any impact on VRAM or mostly on the processing effort?
Why are textures sometimes glitchy in game (like low-res faces on high res skin textures, or square blood splatters) and other times (during the same game or with the same setup) they come out right?