A while back I bought NFS : Shift from a local shop for about £3. I hadn't played it much before. I'm running two 2gb 670s in SLI...
Any way at the time I had 4gb system ram in my PC. I fired up the game and due to running such a barbaric GPU configuration I decided to start using 8XMSAA instead of the 4.
I immediately got a message across the screen in red letters from the Nvidia driver (similar to the 3D messages you get when running 3Dvision) telling me my PC did not have enough memory to run my chosen setting and so it was going to drop to 4XMSAA.
That was the first time I saw such a message so I upgraded to 12gb total. Message gone.
Message has gone because you have enough RAM to do it, however that still means it's tapping in to system RAM and you'd get better FPS if you had more VRAM.
I know with Radeons it works differently and you will see more memory use (VRAM) on a Radeon than you will on a Geforce. I also read (about the panic of the consoles getting 8GB VRAM of sorts) that Nvidia cards can and will tap into system memory when they need to.
This would also explain the drastic performance hit you see between 4XMSAA and 8XMSAA because as soon as you use system memory it will slow things down badly.
This is RAM caching. If RAM is there, stuff will be cahced in it.
So, whether or not the message they were getting with that game was down to VRAM and allocated system memory or the actual VRAM? well I have only ever seen it once and it was down to not having enough system memory to run 8XMSAA.
System RAM will only really be an issue because of the lack of VRAM.
So, providing you use 4XMSAA then you should have no problems and 2gb VRAM is more than enough at the moment so I somewhat disagree with your scaremongering.
Ergo, turning settings down to accommodate the 2GB of VRAM.
It's also not scaremongering, it's anything but that.
It's an observation of, if GPU speeds are largely similar, why would you choose to go for the card which will become obsolete sooner?
I also don't agree with the whole "But mods for XXX game use loads of VRAM".
I never said this, but it's not something you can really disagree with.
They do, I'm not disagreeing with that. But, they are usually very poorly optimised and make the game run like crap any way. Stick to the "out of the box" game and 2gb will be more than enough.
It's not about them being poorly optimised, unless you believe poorly optimised to be the same as "needs more VRAM than I have available". There's little to it when it comes to optimising things like textures, texture resolution ultimately defines the size of a texture and high resolution textures take up more space in RAM than smaller resolution textures.
There really isn't a case of poor optimisation going on. Certain graphical effects consume memory, it's the way it is, and this is why it's said that they are poorly optimised, but they aren't they're just exceeding available resources.
It's like saying raytracing is slow because it's poorly optimised, this isn't the case, it's slow because computational power isn't available yet to allow it to run faster.
So it really just boils down to people claiming things are poorly optimised simply because it doesn't run on their system as well as they'd like.
