Why do Quixel megascan textures use so much VRAM?

Even on the low preset Quixel megascans use a ton of VRAM. I have perhaps 50 1k low preset textures from Quixel in my game and on low scalability settings it uses 7GB of VRAM at 1080p resolution when running around my open world city level with 10 of 25 buildings being textured with no trees or grass. When I turn the scalability settings in Unreal to medium it starts using 8GB of VRAM on average.

There’s no way I can sell my game to a wide audience if I am already maxing out the VRAM on a 3060ti graphics card which has 8gb vram. Perhaps sectioning off my open world city with load zones and walls would make vram usage go down or perhaps the world partition system will be ready for production later this year or next year to lower VRAM usage. Perhaps I shouldn’t use Quixel textures and should find more performant lower quality textures elsewhere. Its a bit demoralizing to only be 30% done texturing my open world level and already be at max VRAM usage with use of only 50 Quixel low preset textures.

Hey everyone so I’m having a problem with quixel Bridge when I go to download assets it’s giving me an error saying assets unavailable for Uasset format

Same here, made a small level with some cliffs and trees, and the fps dropped… Can we make these as instances?

Foliage auto instances if you use the foliage tool.

There is a fixed Texture streaming pool size and unless you’re getting warnings, textures probably aren’t eating up all of the vram.

You can try using virtual textures.

Typically video games reuse a lot of texture data with tiling textures and trim sheets, obviously quixel doesn’t use this approach and every asset has unique textures. But you can try to rework their assets into something more performance friendly.