Firstly whilst I've got a background in hardware and software I don't have any knowledge of the inner workings of GPU vram so I'd appreciate someone with commercial knowledge of such to correct me and add to this thread.
There's been a lot of discussion of whether 1GB/2GB/3GB etc is enough Vram at various resolutions/games, people typically use things like afterburner to measure peak vram usage and then claim on the forum that as GameX uses 2GB of vram on their GPU then that is the minimum needed.
I suspect that such claims are bogus and video cards, much like modern O/S, use as much ram as they can and having less vram than a card would use in GameX doesn't necessarily reduce performance at all.
My reasoning is this, I suspect that a modern GPU will continually load textures/data into Vram without bothering to clean up old/unused data unless it has to, ie it has run out of vram and needs to load new data.
If the above is true then even though a game may use 2.5GB in total, as long as you have say 2GB there could be no performance difference.
Of course the tipping point comes when a game needs say 2GB of ram to render the current scene and a card only has say 1.5GB, at this point we see a nose dive on frame rates as Vram has data continually swapping out to render the scene.
As I said at the start I don't have in depth knowledge of how Vram is managed so I'm interested to hear opinions from people who have a commercial knowledge of such things.
There's been a lot of discussion of whether 1GB/2GB/3GB etc is enough Vram at various resolutions/games, people typically use things like afterburner to measure peak vram usage and then claim on the forum that as GameX uses 2GB of vram on their GPU then that is the minimum needed.
I suspect that such claims are bogus and video cards, much like modern O/S, use as much ram as they can and having less vram than a card would use in GameX doesn't necessarily reduce performance at all.
My reasoning is this, I suspect that a modern GPU will continually load textures/data into Vram without bothering to clean up old/unused data unless it has to, ie it has run out of vram and needs to load new data.
If the above is true then even though a game may use 2.5GB in total, as long as you have say 2GB there could be no performance difference.
Of course the tipping point comes when a game needs say 2GB of ram to render the current scene and a card only has say 1.5GB, at this point we see a nose dive on frame rates as Vram has data continually swapping out to render the scene.
As I said at the start I don't have in depth knowledge of how Vram is managed so I'm interested to hear opinions from people who have a commercial knowledge of such things.