16GB vram enough for the 6900XT? Discuss..

[smogsy]

No doubt, but you have to factor in the OS as it still uses around 300-500mb of video memory from what I’ve seen at a minimum.

I think I agree with pretty much all you say on the matter, just with the caveat that due to my personal experience of saturating 8GB of video memory I would rather go for a GPU with more than enough rather than just about enough for most games.

I remember having a similar debate about video memory on This forum back when Battlefield 3 was released, only then we were debating 2GB vs 3GB.

so true, specially multi monitor setups eat VRAM like fat kid eating cake, 1 screen 50MB 3 screens can see up to 500MB usage easy
my 1080TI is not a fan though (in games)!
funny enough my macbook pro runs these easily without issue! Radeon Pro 555X graphics card. quite surpised to behonest

 

[LtMatt]

so true, specially multi monitor setups eat VRAM like fat kid eating cake, 1 screen 50MB 3 screens can see up to 500MB usage easy
my 1080TI is not a fan though (in games)! funny enough my macbook pro runs these easily without issue! believe it has a 5800 in?

That’s a nice looking setup Smogs. Are you still in a man shed? Am sure you used to be back when we played BF together.

 

[smogsy]

That’s a nice looking setup Smogs. Are you still in a man shed? Am sure you used to be back when we played BF together.

So it was going to be Refurbished (man shed), but moved To a new house, 6 months before lockdown? so got start all again... This time the Shed will bigger & better. However the wife wants one as a library/spa also.. So expect 2 Build logs in the coming year!

can still be found here
https://forum.level1techs.com/t/the-man-cave/77149

 

[4K8KW10]

So my steam copy with the HD texture pack has just installed, and with all the settings maxed out completely in 4k (which is slightly more total pixels than 5120x1440) on my single GTX 1080 I get 7,519Mb allocated but only 5,612Mb in use. This is just a screenshot I took from the benchmark available in the menu.

And the video settings menu as well as the end of the benchmark when you get your results also show you the estimated vRAM usage of the game which is actually fairly accurate, a lot of these menu estimates aren't (i'm looking at you Resi Evil 3)

Please do some gaming for 10 minutes and record the results with GPU-Z:

 

[PrincessFrosty]

My testing was open world driving around from region to region, don’t think I ever ran the in game benchmark to check for stuttering during extended gameplay.

I just jumped in a Heli at the shop just south of Angel's Peak, and flew over the Mae Mae pumpkin farm, flew north along the roads through the towns and other areas, then up north past the F.A.N.G center. I took screenshots of the memory in use when I saw it spike and the highest I got was about 5,900Mb, that was hovering just above the ground in the more built up areas, forcing their textures/assets to load. From what I've experienced so far the benchmark is fairly representative of in game, most of the areas between the more built up sections are running at about 4,000Mb of vRAM used.

As I said I've tested this a lot, people made the same claims about other games which I've just tested and posted screenshots of in the "is 8Gb/10Gb enough" threads, showing that actual usage is way lower than allocated. Doom Eternal maxed out was about 7Gb for me, Resident Evil was like 5-6Gb, Wolfenstein 2 was about 5.5Gb, etc. it doesn't surprise me to see FC5 with the texture pack at 4k ultra at no more than about 6Gb.

 

[LtMatt]

I just jumped in a Heli at the shop just south of Angel's Peak, and flew over the Mae Mae pumpkin farm, flew north along the roads through the towns and other areas, then up north past the F.A.N.G center. I took screenshots of the memory in use when I saw it spike and the highest I got was about 5,900Mb, that was hovering just above the ground in the more built up areas, forcing their textures/assets to load. From what I've experienced so far the benchmark is fairly representative of in game, most of the areas between the more built up sections are running at about 4,000Mb of vRAM used.

As I said I've tested this a lot, people made the same claims about other games which I've just tested and posted screenshots of in the "is 8Gb/10Gb enough" threads, showing that actual usage is way lower than allocated. Doom Eternal maxed out was about 7Gb for me, Resident Evil was like 5-6Gb, Wolfenstein 2 was about 5.5Gb, etc. it doesn't surprise me to see FC5 with the texture pack at 4k ultra at no more than about 6Gb.

It would never show as more video memory usage than what your GPU has though would it? As it can only use whatever you have.

I’d be interested to see a recorded video (showing settings used) with a MSI AB frame time graph displayed to see if you get any hitching as you drive (not flying) from region to region - If you can be bothered as it was similar to how I tested.

 

[4K8KW10]

It would never show as more video memory usage than what your GPU has though would it? As it can only use whatever you have.

Yes, and the best way to test this is by comparing two identical graphics cards but with different memory capacities - for example GTX 1060 6GB - 3GB or RX 480 8GB - 4GB.

Or Radeon VII 16GB vs Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB in the same benchmark since they offer quite similar end performance.

I’d be interested to see a recorded video (showing settings used) with a MSI AB frame time graph displayed to see if you get any hitching as you drive (not flying) from region to region - If you can be bothered as it was similar to how I tested.

 

[LtMatt]

Yes, and the best way to test this is by comparing two identical graphics cards but with different memory capacities - for example GTX 1060 6GB - 3GB or RX 480 8GB - 4GB.

Or Radeon VII 16GB vs Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB in the same benchmark since they offer quite similar end performance.

Yep that was how I did it. And I loved the 5700 XT so I wouldn’t make something like that up, but I hope everyone would know that anyway.

 

[chaparral]

So it was going to be Refurbished (man shed), but moved To a new house, 6 months before lockdown? so got start all again... This time the Shed will bigger & better. However the wife wants one as a library/spa also.. So expect 2 Build logs in the coming year!

can still be found here
https://forum.level1techs.com/t/the-man-cave/77149

WOW am totally Jealous now

What size was that Man cave ?
(Maybe i missed it but i didn't see the size written in the link)

 

[smogsy]

WOW am totally Jealous now

What size was that Man cave ?
(Maybe i missed it but i didn't see the size written in the link)

it was 22 Foot by 16, Dont see why i cannot do 25x25 next time. + whatever the wife wants for her build

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Please do some gaming for 10 minutes and record the results with GPU-Z:

I dont seem to have the same options on there you do, maybe difference in what video cards will expose in the drivers. I'm on a 1080.

I've done one better and just recorded a load of gameplay with MSI Afterburner overlay so I'll just upload somewhere and share the link when it's done.

 

[4K8KW10]

I dont seem to have the same options on there you do, maybe difference in what video cards will expose in the drivers. I'm on a 1080.

I've done one better and just recorded a load of gameplay with MSI Afterburner overlay so I'll just upload somewhere and share the link when it's done.

Nice, thanks, it has an option to see the max - click on the arrow and set Show Highest Reading.
But from the graph I can estimate that the memory used is at least 7.5 GB out of your 8 GB VRAM.

 

[chaparral]

it was 22 Foot by 16, Dont see why i cannot do 25x25 next time. + whatever the wife wants for her build

Thanks

 

[PrincessFrosty]

It would never show as more video memory usage than what your GPU has though would it? As it can only use whatever you have.

I’d be interested to see a recorded video (showing settings used) with a MSI AB frame time graph displayed to see if you get any hitching as you drive (not flying) from region to region - If you can be bothered as it was similar to how I tested.

Technically it can. Because modern GPUs can have memory address spaces which are larger than the dedicated memory on the video card, they just page the excess off onto disk. However most developers know that performance accessing that memory is so slow that it can't be used for anything in real time, so they'll query how much vRAM the video card actually has, and typically allocate less than that to their own process. And then of that allocated amount they'll do some kind of internal memory management paging resources in and out of the game engine as they're needed.

I've literally taken an Nvidia shadow play recording of the whole session I just did that including the MSI OSD metrics I had in my prior images so you can see frame rate and memory usage and some other metrics. It's uploaded to youtube now but it's still processing the video because it was like 4Gb.

 

[LtMatt]

I just did a quick 10 min test (usually test for 30 min period to test true vram usage) here is what i found.

Video memory usage started off at 8GB (actual usage according to this app) as soon as the region loaded and i could get into a car.

I drove around through Faiths region and saw a spike up to 9.5GB.

I drove to Johns region and this dropped down to 8.5, and even to 8GB at one point, before going back to 9GB when i stopped recording.

It would be interesting to see what these values would be in a proper extended test similar to how you would play the game for 30+minutes at a time.

Screenshots attached, will be horrible for you all to view them due to the aspect ratio. Oh, and i forget to disable HDR in this game so the screenshots will look janky due to the colours Lol.

Spoiler

Id say on average the usage was between 8.5GB, but this is just an estimation from watching the overlay as i drove around.

EDIT Fixed last screenshot

 

[LtMatt]

Technically it can. Because modern GPUs can have memory address spaces which are larger than the dedicated memory on the video card, they just page the excess off onto disk. However most developers know that performance accessing that memory is so slow that it can't be used for anything in real time, so they'll query how much vRAM the video card actually has, and typically allocate less than that to their own process. And then of that allocated amount they'll do some kind of internal memory management paging resources in and out of the game engine as they're needed.

Can you test this? Enable supersampling in the Far Cry 5 video options menu and turn it up to maximum which will use up lots of video memory) then show us a screenshot of the game itself using more than the 8192MB on your GPU?

I say this as if you can't show it using more available video memory that what you have, then this is probably not the best way to test if you need more than 8GB. You'll have to go on other metrics, like frame times, hitching etc like i had to when i switched between 8GB-16GB GPUs.

 

[smogsy]

I just did a quick 10 min test (usually test for 30 min period to test true vram usage) here is what i found.

i can view these fine with room either side

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Nice, thanks, it has an option to see the max - click on the arrow and set Show Highest Reading.
But from the graph I can estimate that the memory used is at least 7.5 GB out of your 8 GB VRAM.

Yes but this is measuring the memory allocated to the game, it's not measuring how much of that allocated memory is being used, for that you need to hook the game exe and inspect it's internal use of that memory space. Which is what the new MSI Afterburner beta can do.

You can see from the screenshots I posted on page 3 this agrees with the "allocation" value of about 7500mb. But it's actual use of the vRAM varies from about 4000mb to about 5,800Mb in game. It doesn't go anywhere close to using 8Gb

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Can you test this? Enable supersampling in the Far Cry 5 video options menu and turn it up to maximum which will use up lots of video memory) then show us a screenshot of the game itself using more than the 8192MB on your GPU?

Sure, see the screenshot below. The menu says it will push vRAM usage to a bit over 10Gb, but in reality when you measure what it's using it's no more than 6,800Mb. This is with the resolution slider set to the max for me which is 2.0, you can see the frame rate impact down to 15fps in the screenshot.

I took this screenshot where my gameplay video left off, which has processed the SD version but is too blurry to make out anything, just waiting on the HD processing and I'll post it.

 

[LtMatt]

Sure, see the screenshot below. The menu says it will push vRAM usage to a bit over 10Gb, but in reality when you measure what it's using it's no more than 6,800Mb. This is with the resolution slider set to the max for me which is 2.0, you can see the frame rate impact down to 15fps in the screenshot.

I took this screenshot where my gameplay video left off, which has processed the SD version but is too blurry to make out anything, just waiting on the HD processing and I'll post it.

That is the problem though, you cannot use more video memory than what your card has so it makes this metric kind of pointless. You could require 16GB but your actual usage will not go over 8192MB, as that's all your GPU has so its not really showing you the video memory required to ensure an optimal experience. In the screenshot it shows allocated at 8GB and actual usage at 6.8GB right?

You are basically running 4K with 2x super sampling on the resolution(so probably 8K or something) the video memory usage requirements for that with a HQ Texture pack are huge, yet somehow you can manage that while only using 6.8GB of video memory?