VRAM, RAM, CPU and disk: what heavy mods really need from your PC, game by game, and the settings that trade least for most

24 Oct 2026 · 4 min read · ModsDrop

Pictured: LA Canyons – Realistic California Canyon Track Experience, from the ModsDrop library.

The games on this site run on modest hardware; their heavy mods do not. A 700 MB BeamNG car, a 2 GB map, a 1 GB trailer pack or a 4K truck skin each ask something specific of a PC, and it is rarely the thing people upgrade first. Here is what heavy mods actually need, game by game, and which settings trade the least for the most.

Video memory first

Textures live in VRAM while a scene is on screen. A modded car with 4K textures for every panel can take over a gigabyte by itself; a map with 4K ground textures and a few such cars exceeds 8 GB, and the symptom is not a lower frame rate but stutter: hitches when you turn the camera, spawn a second vehicle, or drive into a new area, as the card swaps textures in and out over the PCIe bus. If your game is smooth alone and stutters with heavy mods, VRAM is the limit. 8 GB is the floor for heavy modding at 1080p; 12 to 16 GB is comfortable; the biggest map-plus-traffic combinations use more.

The cheapest fix is the texture quality setting, one step down. It costs almost nothing visually at 1080p and halves texture memory. Lite versions of mods exist for exactly this reason.

System memory

Maps and mod libraries load into RAM. 16 GB runs any one game with a sensible mod list; a stack of large map mods in ETS2, or BeamNG with a big map and traffic, wants 32 GB to avoid paging. Running a browser with thirty tabs alongside counts too.

The CPU, for soft bodies and traffic

BeamNG’s physics is CPU-bound, and every vehicle on the road is a separate simulation. The number of cars you can have at a steady frame rate is roughly a function of single-core speed and core count; a modern eight-core chip handles eight to twelve traffic cars at 60 frames per second on the official maps, a four-core laptop chip three or four. The truck games and Farming Simulator are far lighter on the CPU; their traffic is not soft-body. No graphics setting fixes a CPU-bound frame rate; the traffic count does.

Storage

Loading times, not frame rate. An SSD cuts a 2 GB map’s first load from minutes to tens of seconds and makes the game’s cache rebuilds (after updates or Clear Cache) tolerable. Mod libraries are large: a few hundred BeamNG vehicles is 100 GB; the library on this site is more than 560 GB. A separate drive for mods and game user folders is a practical choice. HDDs work but every “the map takes forever to load” complaint is one.

Game by game

BeamNG.drive: CPU for traffic, VRAM for textures, RAM for big maps. 0.40 added DLSS, FSR 3/4 and XeSS upscaling and moved Vulkan and D3D12 to bindless rendering; try each renderer, as one is often clearly faster on a given system.
ETS2 and ATS: VRAM for traffic packs and 4K skins in cities; RAM and disk for map stacks; the CPU matters mostly in dense cities with high traffic density. The games’ scaling (render resolution) setting is the lever when a city drops frames.
Farming Simulator 25: large maps and many placeables cost RAM and loading time; shader quality and shadows are the GPU levers; script-heavy mods can cost CPU every frame.
GTA V: texture-heavy vehicle packs and graphics mods hit VRAM hard; the Enhanced edition’s ray tracing adds its own cost.
Assetto Corsa: track mods with dense foliage and high-resolution cars cost VRAM; CSP’s extra effects cost GPU. The CPU is rarely the limit outside large grids.

Settings that trade least for most

Texture quality one step down: large memory saving, small visual cost at 1080p.
Upscaling (DLSS, FSR, XeSS where offered): large GPU saving at 1440p and above, small visual cost.
Traffic count in BeamNG and traffic density in the truck games: the only fix for a CPU limit.
Shadows and ambient occlusion one step down: GPU saving, visible but modest.
Anti-aliasing: the setting people lower first and the one that changes the look most; try the others first.

What does not help

Disabling mods you are not using at the moment (an inactive mod costs nothing; a deactivated one even less; the installed count is irrelevant). Defragmenting an SSD. “Game booster” software, which at best closes background programs you could close yourself and at worst is the kind of download the safety guide warns about. Upgrading the CPU for a VRAM problem, or the GPU for a CPU problem; find out which you have first, with the traffic-off test and the texture-quality test.

Reading a mod page for hardware hints

File size is the first clue: textures are the weight, so a 700 MB car is a VRAM-heavy car. “4K textures” in the features list confirms it. “Lite version available” is an author telling you they know. A traffic pack’s vehicle count tells you the memory cost; a map’s size multiplier (2x, 4x in Farming Simulator) tells you the RAM and loading cost. None of this is a reason not to download; it is a reason to know which setting to touch first.