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2GB Vram The Minimum. Really?

Gibbo is a salesmen, I would prefer to trust neutral sources instead of which there aren't any showing a 1280MB GTX570 struggle in anything.

I don't really know enough about BF3 to know how taxing 60 players is but I don't see how that can be benchmarked fairly unless you coordinate 60 people to do exactly the same thing twice for benchmarking purposes. For all we know on the 1GB run there could have been considerably more particle effects etc in play which lead to a more severed dip in fps. Lag can also affect frame rate and perceived performance.



Unless you have a severe lack of system memory then the page file should not come into play, even with a 3GB Radeon if you have a lack of system memory and disable the pagefile the game is going to struggle primarily because the game runs out of system memory, not video memory.

Even those with 3GB Radeons if you go to screen resolution and click advanced settings you will see that Windows has reserved some "shared system memory".

I thought every card except 680 used page file instead of actual RAM and that's where the issues are? IIRC system memory (before 680) couldn't be utilised and that's why people are talking about big amounts of VRAM?
 
I thought every card except 680 used page file instead of actual RAM and that's where the issues are? IIRC system memory (before 680) couldn't be utilised and that's why people are talking about big amounts of VRAM?

It is the size of processes running that people need more ram. I have 8gig and sit at 36% usage doing normal internet/outlook.

After 10mins my ram was upto 63% (fluctuates though) and BF3 was using almost 2GB of RAM.
 
My own experience is BF3 with 2 GTX 560 1GB on Ultra with 2xAA was 60+ FPS and butter smooth.

With 4xAA on Ultra settings the game kept stuttering and freezing as the cards were running out if VRAM and streaming it from either the HDD or system RAM.
 
In defence of Bhavv, he has a valid point. So much fuss is made about VRAM and I happily ran BF3 on full ultra with AA off at a very comfortable 45fps in 64 MP BF3 with a 560ti 1GB. It always felt smooth to me anyways.

If I turned AA on, it would turn into a slideshow after a couple of mins playing. The video I linked, shows the guy with a 1280MB 570, playing happily with no slowdown.

I disagree in regards to bhavv, he has stated all along that 2X1GB 560ti CAN play on full ultra.

As you said it's fine if you drop the AA, I've always stated that it's 100% fine on any single/dual 1Gb card/s without the AA, this I'm in 100% agreement with and always have been.

:confused:Also the BF3 570 vid you posted isn't conclusive imho as it bounces from fast gameplay with zero fps counter in said gameplay vid, to then cut to another monitor showing high fps in the corner.

Please don't take it as me rubbishing it, I just don't feel it's an accurate portrayal of said performance on said card for this already heated debate.

I could post a vid of my setup doing obscene fps and cut it here and there and voila my setup can do a smooth as butter run with mental high fps too.;)

I can show you anther vid using 570sli with full fps vram usage from a user on another very popular forum(don't know if I can link this forum or not) that states he has spikes and if he turns it down from full ultra it's totally fine:

OP from the thread in Question:

'Hello,
When i'm playing BF3 with 1920x1080 ULTRA and 4xAA i'm experiencing framedrops.. especially in the big maps

when i play with 2xAA its allright..

I'm using the latest forceware 296.10 driver.

HT on my i7 860 is turned off. does anyone knows whats causing this?'


A. 'not enough vram.'

A. (2) 'That is exactly it. Do not even waste any time trying to "fix it" haha. The only thing you can do is deal with it and keep your AA at 2x. You won't notice any difference from 4x to 2x anyways.'

A. (3) 'yeah bf3 maxed out uses pushes 1.5gb of vram usage, but the 570's only have 1.2gb.

honestly msaa isn't worth the performance hit. play with it disabled and use fxaa instead. game looks very similar and will run a lot better'

A. (4) 'FXAA on 'High' looks really good actually, definitely try that as ***** recommended.

OP reply:

'I'll just stick to 2xAA then

thanks for info guys '
 
You will get the same usage on each card, Crossfire (and SLI afaik) mirrors the data on the two cards, so 2 * 1Gb cards have a 1Gb VRAM

You interpreted it wrong mate, my response was to:

Out of interest, does The Witcher 2 benefit from higher levels of vram, or does ubersampling require other higher specs to be considered to get a playable frame rate?

Afaik with Nvidia cards there is a higher vram usage in W2 using ubersampling than AMD's usage.

Iirc correctly the 480's were maxing out their vram limits whereas my Crossfire fps should be halfed(due to the way AB displays it) hence they are using less vram at same settings.:)
 
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What are you harping on about now? Who and why would you turn off your page file?

The OP asked about future proofing and do you seriously need 2GB of VRAM...I showed a VRAM intensive game running full ultra (with AA) running very nicely on a 1280MB 570.

I hope this helps the OP and anybody else who has concerns.

Only it wasn't running very nicely, as it will struggle due to the vram limitations of a 1.2gb card running in Battlefield 3.

And, thanks to Nvidia taking the time to sit down and explain it all we all know why now.

Oddly it seems I was completely right all along. My method of exposing the limitations worked perfectly well too.

Nvidia write a good part about texture streaming and how it isn't ideal. Thus, from what those who did have something constructive to add to my thread (and not a load of rambling nonsense, eh Greg?) we seem to have proven that 1.5gb is the minimum needed to run the game on ultra.

Minimum according to Nvidia themselves.

I especially liked this part of my post, as it turned out to be rather prophetic.


Greg. If I say something to you for the hundredth time will you actually listen and let it sink in?

What you see in FPS when caching from the hard drive counts for nothing. It is simply how fast the image is moving on the screen.

I've tried to explain this to you over and over again, but you just don't seem to get it. Why? is it because you feel that I am trying to upset you by targeting Nvidia.

It's getting quite late now, and I am getting tired. So, I will explain this for you one last time in the hope that it may finally sink in.

Just because you see an amount of FPS on a screen does not equate back to a smooth play experience. Tommy posted a graph last night that explained it, explained lags and delays.

FPS are counted on your screen. They do not depict the time it takes your mouse and keyboard presses to relay into the screen and onto the game.

If I have to explain one more time that I would never have sold my GTX 470 if it could run BF3 smoothly I am going to bloody puke.

I sold it because what FRAPS said in the top corner of my screen counted for crap. It was laggy, and trying to aim load and fire the sniper rifle was being hurt by the texture caches from my hard drive. This in turn led to me dying, a lot. Enough to annoy me enough to want to do something about it.

If you can't grasp that? then I'm sorry mate, because I just can't explain it any more.


And let's now see what Nvidia have to say about it.

When VSync is Off, you may experience a phenomenon known as 'tearing': portions of the image temporarily appear to be out of alignment. This does no harm to your system, but it can be annoying. Enabling VSync removes tearing but aside from capping the framerate, it can also reduce your FPS by up to 50% or more, and importantly, introduce some mouse lag.

http://www.geforce.com/Optimize/Guides/battlefield-3-tweak-guide/#4

Once again Nvidia are wrong though eh Greg? and have no idea what they are talking about eh Greg?

BTW I may aswell cover the root of your problem whilst I am here.

I now fully suspect that the 680 vs 7970 BS will be decided on the next big "BF3 type game".

It'll simply be a case of hare vs tortoise. Right now the 680 is the hare. However, by Nvidia's own admission BF3 already uses well over 1.5gb of vram before you run into issues, so the next big engine could do the same to the 680.

So yes, my point being that any one who paid £430 for a GPU with 2gb on is quite prepared to take a big risk. BTW one last thing.

Here we go again with the school lessons

Yes it did turn out to be a school lesson didn't it? so maybe in future you should be sure of what you say before you say it?

Because you could turn out to be completely wrong.
 
Yep you are correct Andy. That guy on that YouTube vid is wrong and that is totally unplayable. It looked good to me but I also am wrong and anybody who has less than 1280MB cards who think they are playing BF3 are wrong.

Thanks for showing us the error of our ways.
 
as much as it annoys me to agree with ALXAndy - that vid you posted of 570 on ultra is flawed (for the reasons that tommybhoy points out above)

I personally have tried a 570 1.2GB in BF3 and it was not really much better than a 560ti 1GB when on full ultra (e.g. frequent stutter and FPS dips on 1080p/fullAA)

see tommy's vid of 570 SLI to see what happens when it hits the VRAM wall
 
All I was getting at is 1GB or even less can play BF3. I read ALXAndy posting a new thread about VRAM limitations and I knew exactly what he was doing/aiming to prove and I was right (he stated that 1GB was not enough to play BF3).

This is not fair or wise advice for people who only have a 1GB let's say 560ti. (other 1GB cards also).

With a little settings tweaks, you can play the game flawlessly.

I don't know on the authenticity of that vid btw but it would seem pointless cheating and to gain what?
 
so we're back to the "if you turn settings down" defence :D

no one is saying that 1GB cards "can't play BF3", what we have been saying (since page 1) is that "1GB cards can't play BF3 ON ULTRA with 4xMSAA"

I know ALXAndy has a very... aggressive? way of putting his side across, but occaisionally there is a nugget of truth buried somewhere in one of his rants
 
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All I was getting at is 1GB or even less can play BF3. I read ALXAndy posting a new thread about VRAM limitations and I knew exactly what he was doing/aiming to prove and I was right (he stated that 1GB was not enough to play BF3).

This is not fair or wise advice for people who only have a 1GB let's say 560ti. (other 1GB cards also).

With a little settings tweaks, you can play the game flawlessly.

so we're back to the "if you turn settings down" defence :D

no one is saying that 1GB cards "can't play BF3", what we have been saying (since page 1) is that "1GB cards can't play BF3 ON ULTRA with 4xMSAA"

I know ALXAndy has a very... aggressive? way of putting his side across, but occaisionally there is a nugget of truth buried somewhere in one of his rants

I'm presuming ALXAndy has been talking about full ultra settings as well, but I can't speak for him, no doubt he'll let us know.

As andybird pointed out, most of us have stated it's perfectly fine just under the max settings, Ive even stated a few times the best thing to do is turn the settings down as it's nuts imho to bin a great card ie the 1gb 560ti just for the max visuals.

I don't know on the authenticity of that vid btw but it would seem pointless cheating and to gain what?

It probably does cope on the whole well, but even the poster of the vid states:

'in game settings are all ultra... letting the game control AA. some of the frame rate issues are due to textures being on ultra, since the 570 has only 1280mb of vram, when rendering the maximum amount of textures the game engine can handle the amount of video ram needed is estimated to be 1.5gb, so im down a bit on vram. if texture were to be dropped to high the game would run a lot smoother with less random frame rate drops.'

My issue about his vid was that it's easy to cut and paste the 'good bits', here's mine from about BF3 release with constant gameplay, no cutting and chopping:

I thought I would post a small video of Battlefield 3 multiplayer Caspian Border Gameplay performance of my unlocked 6950 shaders @ 6970 clocks in Crossfire.

Benchmarks are all over the place with many discrepancies imo.

There are a few posts saying that 6970 Crossfire is not enough @1080p with Ultra settings, well you can decide for yourselves now.

Specs are:

Battlefield 3 AMD Crossfire Performance
Full Caspian 64 Player Map
Ultra Settings
In game fps using console command:
'Render.DrawFps 1 Boolean'

Amd 6950>70 Crossfire @ 880MHz/1350Mhz
Catalyst 11.10 preview2 + Cap3 Win7
2500K@ 4.5GHz
MSI Z68A-GD55-G3
16GB Corsair Vengeance Red 1866 Mhz
128GB Crucial M4-Windows
120GB Corsair Force 3-BF3
Windows Pagefile is disabled(I don't know if this helps with the stuttering but I've never had any)



This may help if you are trying to decide whether 6950/70's Crossfire is for you or whether it's worth adding a second card.

Yes the videos not centred, that wasn't the point.

P.s I thought the missus was not bad for her first shot of the tank!:p

Remember the vid was a performance indication@launch.
 
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so we're back to the "if you turn settings down" defence :D

no one is saying that 1GB cards "can't play BF3", what we have been saying (since page 1) is that "1GB cards can't play BF3 ON ULTRA with 4xMSAA"

I know ALXAndy has a very... aggressive? way of putting his side across, but occaisionally there is a nugget of truth buried somewhere in one of his rants

Sorry to disagree. It is me who has stated all along that 1GB cards will struggle with 4xmsaa and look through my earlier posts for proof of that.

I read all the posts and take on board knowledge from others. Duff-Man/Xsistor/Drunkenmaster, I would never argue with when they get going on GPU's, as what they mention goes completely over my head.

Sin Chase stated he was playing BF3 in one of these threads with a GTX 285 and was getting a reasonable return rate. ALXAndy then jumps in and basically tells him he wasn't.... The man has no idea of fair argument and sadly if you disagree, you get called a troll or get reported.

He has some good notions but does come across as aggresive and you only have to look at numerous threads to see his disrespect of others.

I am not the sharpest tool in the box and I am a docker who should know nothing about computers however this is a hobby for me and I realy enjoy learning.

I am not sure if this is correct or not but the page file should only be turned off 'if' you have a SSD, as this will help to prolong the life of the drive. Other than that, there is absoloutely no reason to turn off the Page file.

I just hate bad advice and I read ALXAndy stating quite clearly:

Yeah, and no mention of BF3.

Ed. And if you are too slow to work out why disabling the paging file makes your PC faster then you shouldn't be posting on internet forums.

It's only a problem if you lack system memory. IF the problem would be caused by running out due to an application using SYSTEM memory then adding loads more would help.

But this thread was never about that. It was about displaying how 1gb and 1.2gb vram is not enough for BF3 and possibly? the future, and how it most certainly uses your paging file to cache textures.

And if you still don't get it then I feel very sorry for you.

Or does he State, "1GB cards can't play BF3 ON ULTRA with 4xMSAA"
 
Totally false.

I played BF3 on my GTX285 at 1920x1200 medium (some stuff on low, as expected) at a more than playable 45fps average. Reported VRAM usage of between 750 and 850MB out of the 1GB the card had available.

Play with settings within your means. No a 295 is not going to run BF3 on ultra no matter what the specs say on paper and it's not JUST because of VRAM.

Or are you telling us all a 295 will last as long as a 680 or 7970 as long as it had 3GB of VRAM?

I turned everything off. Everything as absolutely low as it would go. Not only did I have terrible problems with the game itself (shadows and such were completely broken) it also just refused to run smoothly no matter what the settings.

So 90 Hours of BF3 at a playable 45 FPS Average @ 1920x1200/Medium(Some Low) on a GTX285 was a complete and utter dream I guess.

I thought I lost a few days somewhere......:rolleyes:
 
Sin Chase stated he was playing BF3 in one of these threads with a GTX 285 and was getting a reasonable return rate. ALXAndy then jumps in and basically tells him he wasn't.... The man has no idea of fair argument and sadly if you disagree, you get called a troll or get reported.

He has some good notions but does come across as aggresive and you only have to look at numerous threads to see his disrespect of others.

This I agree with whole heartedly... he seriously needs to just calm down. I haven't tried to play BF3 on a 285 so I can't comment on who is right.

In this case there seems to be 3 sides to the argument, the pro VRAM, the antiVRAM and then ALXAndy all on his own arguing with everyone for any reason (just like on the 680 rumours thread)


I am not sure if this is correct or not but the page file should only be turned off 'if' you have a SSD, as this will help to prolong the life of the drive. Other than that, there is absoloutely no reason to turn off the Page file.

My opinion on this is; SSD's are usually rated at something like a million hours continuous use. I can't remember the exact number but I read a lifespan for SSD's that talked in terms of amount of data that can be re-written to the drive before it starts failing and it was something like, you would have to completely re-write the entire drive 10 times per day every day for 5 years before it fails.

I only use my PC a couple of hours per day on average, so I don't see it as an issue - I do have 16GB of RAM however so have shrunk my pagefile down to 500mb to try to force windows to stay in RAM as much as possible instead of pre-emptively trying to use pagefile, as a few programs I run (like photoshop) get really antsy if you try to run with no pagefile at all, even if they never need to use it.

Driver problems causing me to re-install windows 3 times probably did more damage to my drive than running a small pagefile
 
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Shrinking your page file sounds wise and tbh, SSD's will always be able to read, so even if they start getting errors, you can copy your data across to a new SSD and lose nothing (that was reported in PC Format a couple of months ago).

By the time 5 years has passed, we will prolly be able to buy a 500 gig SSD for £100~
 
For BF3 when playing at 1080p on a single gtx 570. I just disabled the visual themes and desktop composition in the compatibility tab after right clicking on the exe which freed up 400mb vram.
 
For BF3 when playing at 1080p on a single gtx 570. I just disabled the visual themes and desktop composition in the compatibility tab after right clicking on the exe which freed up 400mb vram.

What game settings Brit please and roughly what fps do you get in return? (Min+Max)
 
Shrinking your page file sounds wise and tbh, SSD's will always be able to read, so even if they start getting errors, you can copy your data across to a new SSD and lose nothing (that was reported in PC Format a couple of months ago).

By the time 5 years has passed, we will prolly be able to buy a 500 gig SSD for £100~

actually, I got it wrong, it was 50 years at 10x total re-write per day, lol

apparently the early flash memory could only handle around 10,000 re-writes, by 1997 it was 100K and by 2005 it was 1-5million

god only know what it is by now
 
For BF3 when playing at 1080p on a single gtx 570. I just disabled the visual themes and desktop composition in the compatibility tab after right clicking on the exe which freed up 400mb vram.

I did this as well. GREAT tip for sub 2GB vRAM users.
 
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