How much VRAM do various games use in Ultra?

King Mustard

King Mustard

King Mustard

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Since the performance of the GTX 970 has been shown to plummet when you use between 3.5 and 4 GB of its VRAM, I want to make sure I wouldn't hit this amount in my games before I choose to purchase the card.

How much VRAM do various games use in Ultra at 1920x1080?

I'm thinking games like Battlefield 4, Grand Theft Auto IV, Far Cry 4 etc.
 
You'd be fine i think with a 970. But SOME games when you turn up the AA and quality settings will use a lot of RAM, and it will like fast RAM. The 970 just doesnt have any to be honest. A 780ti, or even just a 780 would be a better choice if you ask me.
 
I have the 970 and have a 24" monitor running at 1080. For the moment, Battlefield 4 is running at about 160 fps at 100% resolution and uses 1.6gb of ram. Assetto Corsa was using 2.3gb of ram.

I want to do some more testing this weekend.
 
RoosterC said:
I have the 970 and have a 24" monitor running at 1080. For the moment, Battlefield 4 is running at about 160 fps at 100% resolution and uses 1.6gb of ram. Assetto Corsa was using 2.3gb of ram.

I want to do some more testing this weekend.
Click to expand...
I'm talking about VRAM mate, not RAM.
 
Found this...


2lmo09k.png


Sounds like games are already using over 3.5 GB VRAM at 1440p, even at 1080p.


I think I will get a card with 4 GB full-speed VRAM
hmm.gif
 
This is a bit basic, but

Video RAM (VRAM) is on the Graphics card and is used for everything you see on your screen such as textures, graphical effects, anti-aliasing etc.

RAM is used to store everything else like levels/maps etc. The game will generally sit in your RAM whilst playing because it's so much faster than accessing the hard drive. That's why you have loading between levels on games like Crysis 3. It's loading everything it needs from the hard drive to the RAM.
 
Games will use a lot more VRAM than it needs. They cache quite a bit.

Farcry 4 and BF4 run fine with 2Gb @ 1920x1080 @ "ultra". Depends what you mean by "ultra" though, obviously not with 8xAA and full blown post processing/blurring AA.
 
Skyrim with all the mods running ultra is currently doing between the region of 2.8GB and 3.2GB and that's pushing the scripts ;)
 
A lot of these graphs are a little misleading, as quite often games will reserve more vram than they actually use. This is the crux of the massive argument AMD and Nvidia users had over BF4 at 1080p and 2GB vs 3GB cards.
 
Ummm, I run all games (bar DA:I as it dips to 30fps at ultra) at ultra, including BFH at 1080p on my 3GB GTX 780, not Ti, just a 780 (OC'd), and I get 60+fps all the time. Including BFH.

The ONLY game to crash because of memory issue is Shadow of Mordor. And even then, before it crashes, runs smooth as a babies arse. 60+fps.
 
BF4 certainly does not use more than 3.5gb at 1080p.
I'm running 3x1080p on a 970 (albeit high rather than ultra settings) and it's only using 2.5gb. Will try ultra a bit later and see what the result is.
 
1080p ultra BF4 uses 2.5gb on my cards
crysis 3 - 3gb
farcry 3 - 3gb


Shadow of mordor/star citizen uses the most topping over 3.5gb at times (not using ultra textures pack on SoM didn't see a difference tbh)
 
This whole issue of 970 video memory is being completly blown out of proportion imo.

Ok yes they got the official specs slightly wrong and the card can only access the last 0.5gb at a slow speed but the fact remains that the cards performance is amazing for the price. Nothing competes with it. I don't personally know of performance falling when using more then 3.5gb as all games i own only allocate up to 3.5gb, the performacne issue was was a syntheic cuda app which was trying to show the issue.

I own a MSI 970, and noticed it never uses more then 3.5gb of VRAM but i have never have had any issues from performance/gameplay @ 1080p

To answer your question however:
Shadow of mordor high textures 1080p 3.5gb vram used.
Ryse son of rome 1080p 3.5gb vram used.

Both of those games quite happy to use up 3.5gb of vram but they don't have any performance issues on the 970 @ 1080p
 
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