I no longer have many games still installed on my computer. Just did some simple tests on several games. I do not guarantee to cover the most stressful scenes.

Crysis Warhead ending scene: 1393MB



Dragon Age 2 boss fight: 1115MB



Metro 2033 early stage: 1443MB



Napoleon Total War first battle of Italy campaign: 1235MB



Total War Shogun 2 advanced tutorial of land battle: 1547MB



The Witcher 2 inside the inn in Chapter 1: 1152MB



Unigine Heaven Benchmark: 1101MB



So stop asking why I do not recommend putting GTX570s in SLI. Whether you believe there'd be lag spikes due to temporary vram shortage or not, I just don't like running out of resources. When I had my Intel X25-E 64GB and X25-M 160G G2, I still installed 8-12GB physical memory in order to disable page file for Windows, because I hate seeing the HDD light flashing indicating that the whole memory hierarchy is messing with secondary storage.

So far according to my short tests, only Shogun 2 explicitly exceeded 1.5GB vram usage under 19x12. I didn't enable PhysX in Metro 2033 , and I no longer have the save file of later chapters, and I didn't see it pushing over 1.5G.

My words are: for 1920x1200, 1GB vram is not sufficient, especially for DX10/11 games. I would discourage people to SLI/crossfire 1GB cards. The GTX570 was a decent card when it was first released, but when we shift into the DX11 era (as of today there're around 20 games supporting DX11), I could expect games to eat more and more vram, and thus for this reason I don't think it is very wise to put GTX570 in SLI for now. However, 1.5GB still seems sufficient in most cases, and I don't think 1.5GB users need to bother to upgrade to 3GB versions until 28nm process around the end of this year. 3GB is meant for resolutions like 2560x1600 or multiscreen.

Quite hard to read the VRAM useage in those shots - looks like a few are hitting ~1.4gig tho.

Thing is with VRAM useage the impact it has of exceeding the VRAM on the card is quite varied - you could be 500MB over but see no decrease because the game only needs a few MBs at a time swapped... or be only slightly over but see a massive hit because its having to intensively swap data in and out of system RAM.

Thanks for the info, will add to reason growing list to/not to buy certain cards.

Your statement about 1GB of vram is not enough for 1080p is totally wrong. I got a gtx 460 with only 768mb of vram, yet I can play crysis and metro 2033 and other demanding games such as Bad company 2, all on high and while using 1080p resolution.

I just finished crysis warhead, using enthusiast setting for all but shadows (Gamer) at 1080p. Got a solid 30-40 fps in DX10. If I switch to dx9, I get another 7-8fps boost. My GPU is using 750mb of vram while playing at these settings.

Games will adapt to how much vram your computer has, just like windows adapts to how much RAM you have. You might not get best performence, but you can still use the computer pretty easily.

Gux said:

Your statement about 1GB of vram is not enough for 1080p is totally wrong. I got a gtx 460 with only 768mb of vram, yet I can play crysis and metro 2033 and other demanding games such as Bad company 2, all on high and while using 1080p resolution.

I just finished crysis warhead, using enthusiast setting for all but shadows (Gamer) at 1080p. Got a solid 30-40 fps in DX10. If I switch to dx9, I get another 7-8fps boost. My GPU is using 750mb of vram while playing at these settings.

Games will adapt to how much vram your computer has, just like windows adapts to how much RAM you have. You might not get best performence, but you can still use the computer pretty easily.

Click to expand...

We're not talking about if it can run a game, or if it can run it at 40FPS... if you're spending the money for 2x570's, you don't want to be limited by your VRAM.

Gux said:

Your statement about 1GB of vram is not enough for 1080p is totally wrong. I got a gtx 460 with only 768mb of vram, yet I can play crysis and metro 2033 and other demanding games such as Bad company 2, all on high and while using 1080p resolution.

I just finished crysis warhead, using enthusiast setting for all but shadows (Gamer) at 1080p. Got a solid 30-40 fps in DX10. If I switch to dx9, I get another 7-8fps boost. My GPU is using 750mb of vram while playing at these settings.

Games will adapt to how much vram your computer has, just like windows adapts to how much RAM you have. You might not get best performence, but you can still use the computer pretty easily.

Click to expand...

I remember there was a guy who claims to be able to max out Metro 2033 with his 560 Ti 1GB x 2 SLI. However when he first uploaded his benchmark results he showed that he didn't use max settings at all, and when he made the benchmark done right, it was merely 30fps average with horrible lag spikes there. I have also tested Metro 2033 with my 5850 1GB as well, so no matter what you say about your GTX 460, I wouldn't care how it works. It may work for you, but not for me.

Regarding system memory: 6GB physical memory was not enough for me last year when I built my rig, because I need to run virtual machines but I hate pagefile. That's why I gave up aircoolers for CPU and went for Corsair H70 in order to give way for all memory slots on the mobo. You don't care about swapping, but I do, even on the fastest SSD available.

Thanks for the thread. For gamers playing at 1080p should be fine I guess ?

You don't say if your using any AA in these tests...

As using high AA settings will really increase the Vram useage..

chaparral said:

You don't say if your using any AA in these tests...

As using high AA settings will really increase the Vram useage..

Click to expand...

Yes you are right, I was using max settings for each game, and turning down AA should decrease vram usage by a reasonable margin. But for games like Metro 2033, you only have the choice between No AA and 4AA... Anyway, this thread only serves as a reference to enthusiasts who'd like to max out everything.

Running 2 instances of WoW 4.1, each 1680x1050 Window, DX11 max.

1605MB

With 2x gtx 470's, im hitting 1050mb ono in mohaa 2010, 32x aa, 16x af, 1920x1200, dx11 all settings on high.

Click images for full screen.

I've experienced the same. I went from 3x GTX 280 1GB to 3x GTX 470 1.25GB and now 3x GTX 580 1.5GB and the memory usage has steadily increased over time in all the games.

Well there's no point in having graphics memory if it's not used, the question is whether the high usage affects frame-rates or whether local memory is just being used to cache as much as possible to reduce loading screens.

Nonetheless, people shouldn't bother to upgrade from their reasonable quick 1GB card such as 5850/5870 1GB to a 2GB card this gen, considering they are not really much faster on GPU speed, and still stucked on the aging high power consumption 40nm process.

Smart people will wait for the launch of 28nm process 1.5GB/2GB card, rather than jumping on the 2GB boat on a soon to be under-powered, obsolete 40nm card.

This is pretty much what is putting me off building my PC. All I am really waiting on is the next gen of GPUs.

The issue I have with these threads is that you make a series of statements, like '1GB is not enough for 1920x1080' without clarifying that the majority of GPUs with 1GB memory can't run the games at the kind of settings that causes that to be true. Sure, one shouldn't buy two 1GB cards for SLI/CF at 1920x1080 any more, but saying that any 1GB card is pointless/rubbish for 1920x1080 is not true.

Well it probably means 1GB is not enough for 1920x1080 if you expect to play modern & future games at max settings.

who the hell needs 32x aa anyway?

nobody that who, thats where most of your vram is being used

Well i dont play any of those games. So a 570gtx sli would do me fine on 1920x1080

So this tests shows that 570gtx SLI will NOT run 3d vision surround with every settings maxed due to the vram limit with 3 1920x1080 monitors? that sucks, i thought i would get away with 460gtx 768mb sli.

whipgeez said:

who the hell needs 32x aa anyway?

nobody that who, thats where most of your vram is being used

Click to expand...

I can run with 32xaa without any major performance hit on mohaa and bfbc2. Dont have it set at that all the time though. But it was worth trying it to see if it could be done.