LOTR: Shadows of Mordor requires 6GB of vram for optimal textures

The game Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor requires no less than 6GB of vram memory for optimal texture quality in 1080p mode. Owners of a video card with 1GB vram will not get further than a low quality. The system requirements for vram seem to be increasing.

A screenshot of the third-person stealth-action game showing the texture settings has been posted on the Neogaf forum. According to the makers, 6GB of vram is needed to enable “ultra-quality” texture rendering when the game is played on a 1080p screen. There are not many video cards with 6GB or more: these include the GTX Titan, GTX 780 variants, a single R9 280X and the R9 295 X2. The high setting requires 3GB, while the medium and low settings require 2 and 1GB of vram, respectively.

It is still unclear why the game requires so much video memory for the optimal settings. Some argue that the makers would have less high vram requirements if texture compression were used. Others claim that the hunger for vram may be caused by the arrival of the PS4 and Xbox One: they have 8GB of unified ram of the gddr5 type on the PS4 and ddr3 on the Xbox One. Ports of games would therefore increasingly demand more video memory from the PC. Incidentally, the game already has fairly high system requirements.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is out for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and Windows. The release date is October 7.