Nacon has just released its new Souls-like game, Steelrising, on PC. And, surprisingly enough, Steelrising is one of the few games that comes with some ridiculously high VRAM requirements for its Ultra Textures.

Even at 1080p, the game requires more than 13GB of VRAM for enabling its Ultra Textures (on Ultra settings and without Ray Tracing). And at 4K, the amount of VRAM that the game requires exceeds 14GB.

Now I wouldn’t really mind these VRAM requirements if those textures justified them. However, there is nothing on screen that can really justify them. Seriously, when it comes to the quality of its textures, Steelrising feels similar to every game we’ve been getting these past couple of years.

While benchmarking the game, we experienced Texture streaming issues on both the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti and the RTX 3080 at 1440p/Ultra. In numerous places, the game could not load the high-resolution textures. So no, this isn’t similar to the VRAM warning that PC players have been getting in other games like Resident Evil 2 Remake. The game does require more than 13GB of VRAM, and the only GPU that had no texture issues on Ultra was our AMD Radeon RX 6900XT.

Here is a screenshot showcasing these texture streaming VRAM issues on the RTX3080 at 4K/Ultra/No Ray Tracing. Notice the low-quality textures of the distant wall bricks.

When we enabled DLSS Quality (which reduces the overall VRAM requirements), the game was able to load all the high-resolution textures in this scene.

However, we experienced numerous low-quality textures while exploring new areas, even with DLSS Quality (take a look at the distant tree).

Our PC Performance Analysis for Steelrising will go live later this week, so stay tuned for more!