Even if you're correct and disabling the page file causes BF3 to crash due to low VRAM (and not system RAM), that still doesn't mean that 1280MB is an insufficient amount of VRAM to have if performance (when the pagefile is enabled) is unaffected by the swapping.
If you're right then a system with 1280MB card is going to suffer a hell of a lot of HDD thrashing (to pagefile) and massive FPS dips while it happens during gameplay, neither of which seem to occur in reality.
I haven't seen the thousands of GTX470/570 owners complaining about these performance drops? even in this thread there is a video of a GTX570 running the game flawlessly. You have not shown any reliable benchmarks showing a 1280MB getting half the framerate of 2GB cards, infact 1280MB cards still seem to outperform a lot of 2Gb ones.
Windows is designed to operate around a pagefile and so are most applications/games written for it.
What does occur in reality with 1280mb is you end up with input lag, caused by caching to the hard drive.
The same input lag I felt in F3AR, and the same input lag I had with BF3.
Now according to Nvidia's tweak guide you should disable vsync as it will speed up the process. However, then you are subject to tearing. So it's a bit of a lose lose.
Me personally? I didn't disable vsync as I didn't think of it. But, at the same time I would not have wanted to play it with vsync disabled because I can't stand tearing.
Now earlier in the day yesterday I had not sat down and read every last single word of that tweak guide.
Before I posted the link I mentioned problems with aiming the sniper rifle and it reloading on my GTX 470. That was, in hindsight, very clearly input lag. My timings were off, so was my aim and I kept dying.
I will point out again. Nowhere did I say that BF3 was unplayable on cards with 1.2gb or 1gb vram. What I did say, and excuse the bold letters.
BF3 is not playable on 1.2gb or 1gb with ultra settings and 4x aliasing (corrrected Andy, thanks for that ! )
And, I was right.
This thread was not about how to make BF3 run on the card you have with the vram it has. It wasn't an argument over BF3 working or not working on a card with 1.2gb or 1gb.
It was an argument over BF3 not being playable on a 1gb or 1.2gb card using the settings in my opening post.
That is pretty much why I did not run the game at lower settings as that is not what I was trying to prove.
I was trying to show, once and for all, that 1.2gb and 1gb cards are not capable of providing a playable game in BF3 on max settings. Not without lag and other problems that are caused by texture caching which will result in input lag.
I even did my best to explain how that input lag feels to Greg, who had quite clearly missed the boat completely and was ranting on about something else.
I think that is because of the whole metro user interface thingy. Baaaad bad bad.
