• Notice regarding image hosts and attachments. See here.

  • Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Best budget GPU £300

ExoMale said:
You would have to be really pushing it to use 4gb plus, I game at 1920x1080p @ 60hz and I think it was the division that I stayed between 1.7gb & 1.8gb at the very max of my 2gb 270x, so think your safe at 4gb lol
Click to expand...

Actually from all the games I play, the only one that goes to 4GB is the XCOM 2 when MSAA is activated at 2560x1440. Has terrible optimization, and does not have any excuse over eg AW or TW Warhammer or TW Attila, where more is going on the screen and barely scrape 3GB all with MSAA 2x.

To the extend experimented with the XCOM 2 and the VSR. At 5120x2880 resolution on VSR, with AA off, it consumes less VRAM, performance is great and the graphics looking much better also!!!!! Than with native res and MSAA on.

So 4GB HBM is more than enough for time to come at 1080p.

chaparral said:
But would it make the game smoother from having higher FPS that you would get with a 980ti over a RX 480....?
Click to expand...

Ohh yeah. Adaptive sync (Freesync/Gsync) cannot be compared with "more fps". Only if you play few hours you will realise that rather spending money on a 1080 to replace the 980/980Ti, grab a Gsync monitor and relax.....

The image is so smooth even at 40fps. (my monitor Freesync scaler is 39-144). There are some 1080p Freesync monitor where the sync kicks at 30fps. (hence is a bargain atm the RX480 Nitro/Devil etc with a good Freesync monitor for less than £400 all together).

Those of us having 290/290X/390/390X/Fury/X/295X2 with a good 2560x1440 Freesync monitor we are set for years still. Because the performance jump over the last 4 years with the drivers alone is pretty big.
And still having superb Vulcan and DX12 support, even with the ancient 290X, making it still future proof card! :D

And the 290 is 4 years old already, as old at the GTX780Ti and the Titan Black..... beating both them now even at DX11 with new drivers.
 
Last edited:
I think the Fury is definitely the right choice unless you wanna mortgage your house for parts in the future. This way you can upgrade monitor in the future and have a decent selection for cheap unlike if you went Nvidia where esentially you'd have paid Nvidia tax twice, once for the card and once for Gsync.
 
ExoMale said:
You would have to be really pushing it to use 4gb plus, I game at 1920x1080p @ 60hz and I think it was the division that I stayed between 1.7gb & 1.8gb at the very max of my 2gb 270x, so think your safe at 4gb lol
Click to expand...

No offense, but I don't understand why people with lower vram cards state "oh my 4GB card uses under 4GB so you don't need more vram". Am I missing something? Surely if you have a 2GB card, the game can't use over 4GB even if you or the GPU wanted to, let alone over 2GB.

I think a lot of games are similar to windows to an extent as in the more memory you have, the more it uses. The majority of games run without noticeable problems with 4GB and under, but a few like Mirrors Edge Catalyst will refuse to run on Hyper settings with a Fury X at 4K (3-4fps) due to vram.

But isn't it quite clear that if I have a 12GB card and run Rise of the Tomb Raider with Ultra settings, particularly textures, the vram usage will shoot up 7GB instantly. Where as with a Fury X it''s impossible to use 7GB vram, so saying my Fury uses under 4GB, so you don't need over 4GB makes no sense? I do understand that just because the vram is being used it doesn't mean you "need it" though.
 
Last edited:
RanxZy said:
No offense, but I don't understand why people with lower vram cards state "oh my 4GB card uses under 4GB so you don't need more vram". Am I missing something? Surely if you have a 2GB card, the game can't use over 4GB even if you or the GPU wanted to, let alone over 2GB.

I think a lot of games are similar to windows to an extent as in the more memory you have, the more it uses. The majority of games run without noticeable problems with 4GB and under, but a few like Mirrors Edge Catalyst will refuse to run on Hyper settings with a Fury X at 4K (3-4fps) due to vram.

But isn't it quite clear that if I have a 12GB card and run Rise of the Tomb Raider with Ultra settings, particularly textures, the vram usage will shoot up 7GB instantly. Where as with a Fury X it''s impossible to use 7GB vram, so saying my Fury uses under 4GB, so you don't need over 4GB makes no sense? I do understand that just because the vram is being used it doesn't mean you "need it" though.
Click to expand...

The Fury X has HBM which is different to conventional Vram so it works differently and will require less Vram to achieve the same results as having more -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Bandwidth_Memory
 
nick_000000 said:
The Fury X has HBM which is different to conventional Vram so it works differently and will require less Vram to achieve the same results as having more -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Bandwidth_Memory
Click to expand...

Are you honestly trying to show me a wiki link with hardly any relevant information to my point above to prove the Fury X does not need over 4GB? As above I fully realise that just because a Titan X will use 7GB plus, even at 1440p, it does not mean it needs it. My point is that some games will use it regardless because it's there. So some people saying "Oh, no need for 4GB+ just because my 4GB card is not using over 4GB" makes absolutely no sense to me. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR A 4GB CARD TO USE OVER 4GB?

What I don't like from AMD or NVIDIA is people blindly believing their marketing tactics. So AMD, trying to sell you an expensive 4GB limited card, tells you it does not need over 4GB "because how HBM works" and people believe that without any proof? They have no motive or agenda at all to release that statement right?

Just like NVIDIA, a company that wants to extract as much money from your pocket, just like any other, tell us they raised the price of the reference version to help out aftermaket board partners LOL. So some people are like, oh, yeah that makes sense. No questioning that all the extra $100 dollars NVIDIA pockets for making a lame statement gives them a much bigger bonus the consumer is funding.





fLyCJHu.webp


http://www.gamersnexus.net/game-ben...st-graphics-card-benchmark-gtx-1080-1070-390x

"The Fury X and GTX 970 refused to run with any stability – we think that's a VRAM limitation – and so the chart only shows the 390X, 1080, 980 Ti, and 1070. All of these cards have 8GB of VRAM, except the 980 Ti and its 6GB.

The GTX 1080 runs 29.5% slower with “Hyper” graphics than with “Ultra.” The GTX 1070 trails as expected, based upon our GTX 1070 review. The R9 390X runs at 54FPS on Hyper, versus 79.7FPS on “Ultra.” For most devices, 1440p/Ultra is fairly close in performance with 1080/Hyper – but the 980 Ti shows the choke-point: Memory. Being the only card with 6GB VRAM on this particular chart, the 980 Ti scales poorer than the 8GB counterparts. It still does well, don't get us wrong; but the 980 Ti does serve as a point of clarity for when Mirror's Edge is most hungry for VRAM."





Qe9Y3ca.webp


http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/gpu_displays/mirror_s_edge_catalyst_pc_performance_review/10

At 4K Mirror's Edge: Catalyst is very playable at the low preset, with both GPUs maintaining framerates over 60 at almost all times.

Just like when playing at 1440p we see that AMD's R9 Fury X holds the performance lead, but sadly at this resolution the R9 Fury X simply does not have enough VRAM to play the game at the highest settings.

At Hyper the game turns into a literal slideshow for the R9 Fury X, as the GPUs 4GB of VRAM is fully saturated. The Ultra we do not see quite as much performance degradation, but the minimum framerates take a significant hit and are very noticeable during gameplay.

Both GPUs maintain framerates of over 30FPS at up to high settings at 4K, but given this game's focus on speed a higher framerate at lower settings is preferable. We are going to need significantly more powerful GPUs in order to play this game at 4K Hyper settings at 60+FPS and AMD will need to release a GPU with more VRAM.
 
Last edited:
Jack1991 said:
Yeah I would have liked more ram but it does seem to be the best option for me with the crappy monitor that I have.
Click to expand...

Op take no notice about my points above as I'm making them based on a separate idea that I can't understand how you can assume others needs when you have a limiting factor yourself. The Fury will be great with your monitor at 1080p with Freesync.
 
Fury is a great suggestion if you want to spend all your budget. But personally I would get a 480, have money left over for something else and also know that I have forward-looking features like HDR support and h265 decoding. If you're on 1080 for the foreseeable future, it's a good buy.

But I think either suggestion is good.
 
Bonjour said:
I think certain games will allocate all of the VRAM that's available, regardless of whether it needs it or not.
Click to expand...

Absolutely they will - and they should! If you're loading a bunch of textures into VRAM and then you need to load a bunch more, should you remove the old ones which you're 90% certain you don't actually need anymore so you can use that space, or just put the new ones in the free space you already have? The latter. In practice it will make almost no difference though very occasionally it does (game guesses wrong about whether it will need that texture on screen again) so the end result to your monitoring software is that the 2GB card has its VRAM filled, and so does the 4GB card, but it's making no practical difference to performance because half of the data in the 4GB card are old data that hasn't been cleared out simply because it hasn't needed to reclaim the space.

When caching, you use empty space preferentially over used space, even if the data in that used space is never needed again. So VRAM often looks full without that meaning it's actually being fully utilized.
 
h4rm0ny said:
Absolutely they will - and they should! If you're loading a bunch of textures into VRAM and then you need to load a bunch more, should you remove the old ones which you're 90% certain you don't actually need anymore so you can use that space, or just put the new ones in the free space you already have? The latter. In practice it will make almost no difference though very occasionally it does (game guesses wrong about whether it will need that texture on screen again) so the end result to your monitoring software is that the 2GB card has its VRAM filled, and so does the 4GB card, but it's making no practical difference to performance because half of the data in the 4GB card are old data that hasn't been cleared out simply because it hasn't needed to reclaim the space.

When caching, you use empty space preferentially over used space, even if the data in that used space is never needed again. So VRAM often looks full without that meaning it's actually being fully utilized.
Click to expand...

Thank you for a more detailed explanation :)
 
Bonjour said:
Thank you for a more detailed explanation :)
Click to expand...

No problem. It is said that in computer programming there are only two things that are actually hard. Semaphore handling, cache invalidation and bounds checking.

So if you're given loads of empty VRAM and there's even a chance that you might still need the cached data already there (no matter how tiny that chance), you might as well just keep filling it up until you've filled it. Doesn't mean you need it. It's the graphics card equivalent of people who own fifty pairs of shoes. Doesn't mean they have a hundred feet.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom