Unlimited Video Memory - Does It Help or Hinder Performance?

[Quickening]

I've seen a lot of people on this forum say that checking the Unlimited Video Memory box in the graphical settings helps with performance, but the tooltip in the game says that it should degrade performance.
I'm not much of a tech guy, and I don't really understand how allowing the game access to more memory would make the performance worse. Does anyone know what the situation is with this option?

[BeastG33]

No, it degrades performance but makes the game look much better.

[Baleur]

The reason it makes the game "look better" (which it doesnt technically do), is because it simply PREVENTS the game from REDUCING your graphics settings in real-time.
Most notably anti-aliasing, which is the first to go as soon as you start any battle what so ever (even if you get 40fps, it disables AA by default since AA uses alot of video memory).

It's quite a ridiculous thing that we must turn on that setting in order to actually get the graphics settings we just bloody selected. It was the same in Shogun 2, though there you needed the preferences file tweak.

So simply put it's frankly better to keep it checked and just lower individual settings like shadows or unit detail until you find the culprit for bad preformance.
If you keep it unchecked you'll never identify which setting affects your framerate, as all the other settings will dynamically be reduced as well during play.
Degrades preformance because it now uses the settings you selected.

[Vernah]

I have a Radeon HD 7950 with 3gb of memory. I believe if you have this much video memory you DO want to have it checked on. I no longer crash and I also have a performance increase as well. If you have less than this then I believe you want to have it unchecked.