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2GB Vram The Minimum. Really?
- Thread starter sparky05084
- Start date
Eh? this thread is about vram. Hence the title.
And, crap the bed ! there are circumstances where it becomes a crucial factor.
Keep twisting man. I'll get your shovel out for you to dig with.
It's crushingly simple. And, had you been paying attention you would have worked it out.
For raw GPU computing power the 560ti and GTX 570 are very fast cards. More than capable of throwing pretty much anything around at 1080p.
See also - My GTX 295s. It was faster than both.
In absolutely everything I ran my cards in, whether alone or together, they absolutely smashed the 560ti and 570. Synthetics it was even more apparent.
And then, BF3 came out.
Up until that point the mid range champ was the 560ti 1gb. Quite simply as, at 1080p it was every bit as capable as the GTX 570, with the GTX 580 being the "complete overkill for 1080p" card.
But, it was quickly realised that something sinister was going on with BF3. People were having terrible trouble maxing it out on those cards, even at 1080p.
And when they worked it out they realised that it was simply eating vram. So much so that it was exceeding the specs of the cards that did not have enough. When you run out of vram in BF3 the game then looks to the next available source. That isn't system ram, as that is usually reserved for other things like Windows, Aero and any apps you have running underneath.
So, it turns to the paging file on your hard drive, which is usually the same size as your overall ram.
Vram is incredibly fast. Offering operating speeds some three to four times faster (as an overall frequency) than DDR3, even 2000mhz stuff.
So, with that said caching textures into system memory would be bad enough, but a hard drive? Terrible. Absolutely terrible.
It's pretty much impossible to spot in benchmarks. When you look at a benchmark you look at a set of numbers on your screen. It does not, and WILL NOT reflect real life scenarios.
So as an example in benchmarks we see massive frame counts. What it doesn't show, of course, is the tearing that occurs because there is no sync enabled.
So, for the most part we lock our syncs and then lock our FPS to the sync rate the monitor offers. Which, in 85%+ of households is 60 FPS.
Thus, as you seem unable to grasp, in most if not all scenarios the extra 6 FPS you get out of a 680 @ 1080p over a 7970 is completely pointless.
If you run out of vram however? you could have the fastest card in the world. Faster at absolutely every last thing than the competitor. It doesn't count for crap if you run out of vram.
My 295s battered out scores on Vantage and so on like you absolutely would not believe. Yet, in BF3 they were rendered useless. Even if I turned everything off and lowered everything to minimum they still struggled, as 896mb vram was not enough to throw around even the low rate textures.
So whats going on here then, Vram limitation?
I seriously doubt that 256 Mb vram causes a 15 FPS performance increase.
Why do the 1280 Mb cards have higher minimums than 2 Gb cards?
Explain this.
Such a rubbish explanation, you simply refuse to accept that BF3 is GPU limited, not Vram limited.
Every review will show you that the 1280 Mb 560 and 570 play the game perfectly with no vram problems.
Caching vram data into system memory is actually very fast, it only causes a minor fps reduction, but I'm still managing to maintain 50+ fps in Skyrim with zero lag while my vram is sat on full use with 4x AA and unofficial HD textures.
Every review will show you that the 1280 Mb 560 and 570 play the game perfectly with no vram problems.
Caching vram data into system memory is actually very fast, it only causes a minor fps reduction, but I'm still managing to maintain 50+ fps in Skyrim with zero lag while my vram is sat on full use with 4x AA and unofficial HD textures.
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I don't care what they show. I had a 470 pictured here.
Which of course I sold and replaced with a 6970 in the same picture.
So as I continue to point out to you - stop being so narrow minded. Letters and numbers on the internet DO NOT depict facts.
Whilst I am at it, here is Quad SLI 295.
So, I speak from experience. More than you seem to have, given you just state numbers from the internet.
470 is slower than a 570, its slower than a overclocked 560 ti too, of course its going to perform badly in BF3, its an obsolete out of date GPU that's far too slow for BF3.
So you're basically telling me again that everysingle GTX 570 review is a lie?
Experience LOL! Ive been using soooo many more 1 gb vram setups than you ever have and I've never had lag spikes or bad performance
.
You were running quadfire 285s when I was maxing every latest game out with two 4850s, what a waste of money.
So you're basically telling me again that everysingle GTX 570 review is a lie?
Experience LOL! Ive been using soooo many more 1 gb vram setups than you ever have and I've never had lag spikes or bad performance
.You were running quadfire 285s when I was maxing every latest game out with two 4850s, what a waste of money.
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Here come the dodges ! dodge dodge dodge !!!
Throw in even more variables to try and complicate it all you like, I don't care.
FYI I had the 470 at 785mhz on the core so on PAPER it was right up there with the 6970.
As for your obsolete GPUs? you seem unable to grasp that they are the bread and butter cards for AMD and Nvidia. Not the stupid overpowered cards like the 7970 and 680.
In raw performance my 295s put out the same sort of scores the 7970 and 680 do in things like Vantage. However, BF3 was completely unplayable and it wasn't down to GPU horsepower.
It was because of this.
And you can keep dodging that as much as you like.
And you can keep on dodging how well the gtx 570 runs bf3 too with only 1280 Mb vram, the game is clearly not vram limited.
Raw GPU power is the issue, BF3 is terribly coded and simply doesn't work well on architectures below the Gtx 570s gpu.
Raw GPU power is the issue, BF3 is terribly coded and simply doesn't work well on architectures below the Gtx 570s gpu.
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I run ultra at 1080p with sli trwin frozr ii sli 580's 1536 version..never had a prob
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http://www.overclock.net/t/1151904/bf3-actual-vram-usage
I'm amazed my GTX 570 VRAM gets maxed out with no AA at 1920x1200. This sucks...
Did you read the entire thread? There's many people there unable to replicate it.
One person even reported 4.9GB usage, which is impossible if it was VRAM.
Others had no problem with it at all using 1.2-1.5GB cards.
Vram usage does not correlate to performance, vram caching in excess amounts of vram does not increase performance.
I have no idea why you continuously remain a pathological liar with next to clue on what you are talking about when it comes to vram.
1280 Mb gtx 560 to 448 is sufficient for BF3 ultra at over 25 FPS min frame rates. Two of them are absolutely fantastic and vaslty outperform a pair of 2 gb GTX 560 tis all the way up to 1440p.
No vram limitation at all!
Source, hardware canucks GTX 560 448 review.
I have no idea why you continuously remain a pathological liar with next to clue on what you are talking about when it comes to vram.
1280 Mb gtx 560 to 448 is sufficient for BF3 ultra at over 25 FPS min frame rates. Two of them are absolutely fantastic and vaslty outperform a pair of 2 gb GTX 560 tis all the way up to 1440p.
No vram limitation at all!
Source, hardware canucks GTX 560 448 review.
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You need to understand that maxed out does not automatically mean slower performance, have a read about Windows Superfetch if you want to know how memory is used in this day and age.
The same can be said for VRAM, a game might fill it with data that might not even be used until 10 levels later, in BF3 it might decide to load textures for ALL of the maps and not just the one that you are playing.
At the end of the day it is far better to have your RAM filled with what might be needed later than to leave it half empty, if you have a 3GB card with only 2GB usage then you have memory being wasted basically.
If VRAM was a problem 1280MB cards would not still be outperforming 2GB cards.
Because 1280MB is less of a problem than 1024MB and the GPU grunt still has a part to play.
No one knows how much past the limit before the gradual effect starts to slow things down and the performance percentage hit associated, it could be 50mb,100mb,200mb and game dependent ect...
Vram limitation takes a percentage of the performance away so of course a faster card that is 20% faster but has taken a 10% Vram performance hit is still going to be faster than a card which is 20% slower with no Vram hit, just trying it keep it simple.
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this thread is full of win
I've read a fair chunk of it.
I tried all of the updates for BF3 and all of the driver updates from Nvidia that were supposed to improve performance.
Yet, even though FRAPS showed a decent FPS in the top corner the game was laggy and stuttered.
It almost felt like vsync issues, yet I had it enabled and I could actually see it capping at 60 FPS in the few instances it went that high.
I was just as eager to disprove it as some others in this thread. I would be ! I had three bloody expensive graphics cards that could not run it properly.
To make sure all variables were ruled out I ran the game on all of the cards in two completely different systems. One was a I7 920 @ 3.6ghz, the other was my I7 950 at both stock and 4ghz.
And each time the results were exactly the same.
My GTX 470 was by no means a slouch. Infact, it was pretty much dead even with the brand new 560 TI 448. However, it could not run Battlefield 3 smoothly with everything on ultra AND 4SFSAA. And there is a reason for that.
How do I know for sure? easy. At the time I first started playing BF3 I had 9gb ram. 3x1gb 1600mhz and 3x6gb 1600mhz. So 9gb total, running Windows Ultimate X64.
Again at that time I was using a 60gb Patriot SSD to boot from, so I had disabled my paging file. Up until that point like many others who have brought it up on this forum I had never had any issues with having it disabled. However, as soon as I started playing BF3 I was getting paging errors.
So what was trying to use the paging file? BF3. It was clearly running out of vram and trying to cache textures to my paging file on the hard drive. Yet, because I had disabled it the game simply crashed to desktop with paging file errors.
Now in hindsight what I should have done was just, you know? uninstalled Battlefield 3 as it's a bit crap. Instead I fell for the hype and ended up spending a fortune on a new GPU.
Now there was a very good reason I did that. I don't upgrade my computer unless I deem it worthwhile and completely necessary.
So I maintain. The FPS scores you see in benchmarks are smokescreens. They do not depict tearing or stutter or even microstutter if it doesn't last for more than a second. However, *I* notice it. What my 295s did on paper and what they did in reality differed hugely. When I sold the second system with the 295s in I simply ran Vantage when the guy came. He was happy, PC sold.
Last thing I would have done was run BF3. He'd have ran a mile.
So maybe it comes down to how acute your vision is at picking out anomalies? I know for a fact that I have an incredible set of eyes.
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As do i and 2 x580's with 1.5 vram is smooth as butter. With zero lag/stutter/fps drops.