Buy More RAM or GPU with more memory?

sunnyd76

sunnyd76

sunnyd76

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8 Feb 2015
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Hi Folks,

I have a 3570k with 16GB RAM. I have 3 monitors (1080/1440/5k). I use the system mostly for running trading apps via Chrome. Chrome is pretty memory hungry and can use up to 8GB of my system memory and 3.8GB of my GPU memory. When the system is under heavy load system memory usage can often hit 85%. I've noticed when I connect my 5k monitor that GPU memory usage goes up a fair bit.

I'm not sure how GPU memory works for desktop/2d applications. The question I have is that If I upgrade my main RAM to 32GB, will this reduce the memory usage on the GPU, i.e. will GPU share system memory and not have to swap to disk? Otherwise should I consider upgrading the GPU as well as RAM?

Other option is to update to a new Ryzen build with more RAM, I guess the extra threads would be a huge boost to the multitasking load also

Cheers,
Sunny
 
It really depends on what you are running, no idea what this trading app is. 8GB RAM usage by a browser is pretty hefty, have you tried Firefox or something? And how much memory does the GPU have? If you are hitting almost 90% RAM then clearly you need more RAM. As for GPU, I dont get why a trading app is using the GPU so much, what is it doing?
 
Cheers for the responses guys...

Badfish I'm running a trading app but that isn't the problem. My main charts actually run on a website called www.tradingview.com. The charts use up a lot of ram *and cpu. Firefox is better for memory, actually Waterfox is the best, but it has other issues because it doesn't support html5 correctly so charts are broken.

The GPU has 4GB memory, it's a GTX 980 Windforce. Not sure why it's using up so much GPU memory either, I assume it's because when my System memory hits 85% ish then the system allocates apps to the GPU - No idea though, i'm not sure if the GPU memory is shared with the system or not

Honeybadger. Do you know if the GPU and system memory are shared in windows 10 as per last paragraph? Thing is that to throw another cat amongst the pidgeons, Chrome uses hardware acceleration, so I assume some of the charts are rendered using the GPU (and hence in memory?).

I guess this goes back to the main question, if I ugrade my system memory (cheaply) will the GPU be able to offload programs from it's memory to the system memory and run better? Or will I need to upgrade my GPU with more memory to run the charts/5k etc...
 
Random question but you don't have loads of pinned tabs do you? Worth checking how many instances of Chrome are present in task manager because that can inflate its usage quite significantly...
 
Hey Smffy. Ahem, yes i have 42 tabs open and there are 55 chrome process running. i could reduce it down to 35 tabs but that would be the bare minimum i need to run
 
Only 42? I can totally beat that, and it's mostly just tech news and Ark Survival sites :P

I do run 32gb of memory though, which helps :) As far as I know, Windows cannot allocate GPU memory as system memory. Likely you're running up quite a big swap file.
 
Hi Kurgen. I didn't realise you don't have to put GPU's in SLI - never owned more than one card at a time lol. So is non SLI the default configuration when the system detects 2> cards for the first time?

If the new build doesn't fix the issue then I'll look into this further... Will need to buy another GPU at some point in any case, want to have total of 6 monitors connected eventually
 
yes, you can put whatever you want in.. just remmeber some applications might winge a bit or flicker if you move the active window over to the other screen, things like AutoCAD etc that use hardware acceleration, clearly if you where playing BF1 and dragged it over to screen running a £20 card it would crash and die. but for generally use i dont see any issues.have you got an old card you can try.
 
No old card unfortunately, but I could take a look for a used 1070 or lower, if I can find one with 8GB - should do the trick I hope!

Atm I'm thinking:

980 (4gb) would run: 1080/1440/4k
1060/1070 (8gb): 3 x 4k

What do you guys think?

Will See how I get on with the extra ram tomorrow and let you know what is decided

Cheers for your help all....
S
 
not convinced myself that any high end card is needed for what your doing, if its browser based any cheapo card will do that can output the resolution.. read this internet quote

graphics processing power could be a system performance bottleneck, but this really depends on what you are doing on the computer.

If we forget about gaming needs (or CAD / video rendering requirements which are a discipline all of their own!) then what a graphics card needs to do is display the output from your PC. Its job is to interpret the data from your PC and ‘draw’ it to your monitors.

I can tell you that a £900 gaming graphics card will not draw an excel document or a chart to your monitor any faster than a (seemingly) lower powered GT 730 card. The reason why not is because the graphics ‘horsepower’ level needed to draw 2D images onto a screen in a seemingly instantaneous fashion was smashed through years ago.

Once you get over this level of processing power then any gains offered in desktop 2D graphics are negligible at best.
 
wouldn't something like a used NVIDIA Quadro K620 do the job, doesn't need any additional power

Max Resolution 4096 x 2160 at 60 Hz
Max Resolution Details DVI (Single-Link):1920 x 1200 / DVI (Dual-Link):2560 x 1600 / DisplayPort:4096 x 2160
Max Monitors Supported 2
Interfaces DVI-I (dual link)
DisplayPort
DVI-D (Single-Link) - with adapter
 
Are you actually seeing performance problems, and if so, can you give any more details on what you experience? For example, you might be seeing slow redrawing when switching or moving windows around.

Chrome will use a lot of system memory (and the GPU memory utilisation is partly for video framebuffer (so a fair amount for a 5K display area) and for caching hardware accelerated canvasses such as web pages and components within) - but high memory usage isn't necessarily a problem in itself. It'll be using as much memory as it can (i.e. caching) to deliver the best performance with the resources you give it. Usually this works out; sometimes not, particularly if overloaded.
 
Sorry guys been busy with the build this week so not updated, but....

Since the upgrade of mobo/cpu/mem, the performance is a lot better. I think the system memory may have been a huge bottleneck. I still see the VRAM hitting 3.9gb but the web pages don't crash anymore and moving around them is far more fluid, so like you say, the cache is able to offload to RAM. There is still room for improvement as I'm running ddr4 2333Mhz, will try 3000MHz once i get this ******* graphics card issue resolved:

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/t...ocked-drivers-borked-new-x399-build.18790161/
 
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