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nvidia 2011

My operating system is 64 bit, but as I said, video RAM must be matched by system RAM on the motherboard, RAM is still expensive so if you have a Crossfire or SLI running with 2 two gig cards then a bottleneck may occur.

As far as I can see 1.5 gig is overkill for most modern games that still use DX9c....let alone DX10.

People may disagree on this though.

Cheers

Von
 
VonScar said:
Its something to do with memory mapping from the video card to system RAM.
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What are you talking about?

Are you trying to say that if you are running a 1.5GB video card (GTX 480/580) in a decent gaming system with 4GB of RAM, then it will use up 1.5GB of system RAM because there is a large amount of video memory, leaving you with only 2.5GB of usable system RAM?
 
Seemingly he's getting confused with 32bit and that's how it is for all computers. The memory mapping thing is to do with 32bit operating systems. I have 8GB of RAM and a 2GB RAM graphics card and I get to use the whole of my 8GB of system RAM.
 
32 bit Windows can only address around 4gb of RAM in the entire system, including vRAM. Therefore the more memory your graphics board has, the less system RAM can be used.

64 bit Windows doesn't have this limitation, so unless you have 128 gig of system RAM installed (!) your video card won't eat into it:)
 
As I said, I have 64 bit Windows, I am aware that Microsoft limit memory for 32 bit Windows to around 3.25 gig of RAM (system).

What I AM referring to is that video card RAM might...create a bottleneck....for example you have 4 gig of RAM in a computer system, you then put TWO video cards in, with say 2 gig of onboard memory each, this memory (on the video cards) might need to be allocated to the system RAM possibly causing a bottleneck...

A person who stated above who has 8 gig of RAM would not notice any issues, one because he has double the amount of system RAM then what I am aware might cause the bottleneck, and probably uses 64 bit Windows.

But, I cannot recall from where I read this information, if anyone has some "proper" evidence on the supposed issue, feel free to butt in :).
 
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I think I get what you mean, like the whole pool of memory the graphics card uses needs to be copied in to system RAM, I've heard that before but I don't know how true it actually is. As for having 2x 2GB GPUs, that shouldn't result in 4GB should the allocation thing be true, as with multi GPU setups, the available RAM is mirrored on each GPU so in effect you still only have 2GB of RAM as each GPU needs the exact same things being loaded in and out even though you physically have 4GB of video RAM.
 
Duff-Man said:
But as pointed out earlier, 2Gb is really pretty irrelevant right now. Even with a triple 30" setup, the 1.5Gb of the GTX480 / 580 is sufficient to run just about everything. With single-screen setups it's total overkill. Having more GPU memory does not improve performance (unless the game scene has used all the available memory already).
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Really? Is that from experience?

Because how come I can hit the limit quite easily with 3x 1920x1200 screens on a pair of 480's?
In a number of games this is even before AA is taken into consideration.

I've found with the 480's I hit the vram limit before I hit the gpu processing power limit.
With the pair of 5870 2gb's I picked up the other day for £50 a pop, I found it to be the other way around.

If only the 580 had 3gb of vram. :(
 
well not had that in my experience m8, i have 2 gtx 480's in sli, so that 3gb in total, so from what you are saying that in a game i will need to match that size with ddr3,and well no you dont, i have run various monitoring progs, and the system ram usage is always different to the gpu ram usage and quite often a lot less so no, in my opinion that fact is incorrect, the gpu processes its own information therefore not requiring the help of system ram, the only time this is apparent is when you have onboard graphics, then the system memory is shared.
 
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