how much vram do you think future games will use?

Stutter can absolutely come from lack of VRAM even when you have plenty of spare system memory. In fact in my experience it is quite distinctive in that it is juddery at a relatively high/stable framerate, whereas when you get disk paging you get massive fluctuations. Kinda like this.

GPU stutter:
....-....-....-....-....-

System stutter:
...---..........----------..........-.-----------

Good examples tend to be when you swing the mouse round in a big complex area, something like modded Oblivion with AA enabled should do the trick (on a card with <512MB VRAM obviously). Recently I noticed it in NFS Hot Pursuit with AA enabled, game is capped at 60fps but you'd get kinda like 48fps, not smooth, yet not erratic, but rather a consistent hitching.

Don't forget that system memory is significantly slower than GPU memory, you are talking well over 100GB/s on graphics cards (some overclocked GTX580s have over 200GB/s) whereas system memory bandwidth tends to be under 50GB/s

I'm not suggesting that system paging isn't an issue, often in the past when people increased texture quality they would get stutter and yes it would be down to lack of system memory rather than necessarily a GPU limitation (FEAR on 1GB systems being a good example).
 
Last edited:
Even playing Fallout 3 at 1920x1200 4xAA sees my Vram usage going to 900mb so I expect on some parts of the map, my 1gb card would run out of ram briefly. For my next card I want at least 1.5gb, possibly 2gb. Just because I can. It's the main reason I haven't really looked at the GTX 560 although there are 2gb versions on their way. I'm keeping an eye on just how cheap these GTX 480s get. Aside from that I'll probably just get a new card at the end of the year or early next year.
 
I bought my 1Gb 4850 back in July 2009 from OC for just £75!!! (brand new Powercolor), which was only £5 more than some of the 512mb versions (which had slightly higher clock speeds).

18mths later and the card finally came into its own when i bought GTAIV and Bad Company 2 in the steam sales...which on very high settings with 4xAA, both games use well over 800mb of Vram and give me 40-50FPS, so in the long run, buying a 1Gb card has payed off handsomely for me.

Which is why, if i was upgrading now, i would definately go for a 2Gb card (that 2GB 560 is very tempting), but only because i keep my cards at least 2yrs, and fully expect Battlefield 3 to push over the 1Gb Vram usage..at least i hope it does..:)
 
Last edited:
IIRC even on faster i7 and newer setups System RAM don't exceed 30GB/s and older systems can easily be around 10 or less. If your just over the VRAM limit it doesn't really make much odds - shuttling the odd <7MB texture around is pretty quick its when your paging several large textures frequently that you start to get hitches.

I have a program I use for testing VRAM that can keep shovelling data into VRAM to test until it pages out into physical memory and the test time per block doesn't slow down enough to cause any noticeable performance degredation until your using well over 200MB beyond the VRAM limit on a fast PC.

EDIT: Just giving it a quick whirl on a GTX260 - framerate in the test app starts at 48fps - there was no noticeable hitching (to me) until the total VRAM useage was 332MB over the amount of actual VRAM (896MB) by which point the framerate had slowed to 35fps - so even when its not causing noticeable hitching, etc. theres quite a degredation in framerate from unmanaged paging.
 
Last edited:
It all depends on how extreme your demands are. For the vast majority of games now and 1-2 years ahead, a 1.5 GB VRAM card like the GTX 580 will suffice - even on a 30" 2560x1600 monitor.

However, if like me you are the kind of person who like to push things to the extreme as part of this hobby of gaming there are scenarios where something like the 3GB GTX 580s will be of value. Modding with high resolution textures and using Super Sampling AA can result in a VRAM demand far in excess of 1.5GB.

As an example, I want to use 3x3 SSAA wíth GTA IV at a resolution of 2560 x1600 (effective resolution 7680 x 4800) and this is simply not possible with the stock GTX 580.
 
thanks for all your response, i guess i should have mentioned that value wasnt important.

yep DennisK4 i am like you, i will be using ENB and another visual mods (is this how you have AA in gta?) and already use 1200mb without these, ill upgrade to a 30" montior soon aswell.

im still leaning towards the phantom, the way i see it, its worth the extra over palit 3gb, which is worth the extra over reference. So if im going 580 ill go phantom, if it ever comes into stock :(

found this, from gta in 2008 1576mb @ 1440x900, dread to think how much 2560x1600 needed.

 
^^^^^ haha i got that 6 hours after reading it, good one, slow me :confused:

EDIT/UPDATE : Just discovered gta4 +ENBmods wants 2400mb vram so phantom it is. Thanks a lot DennisK4
for getting me to look into that. Thanks for all other replies too nice site this. Phantom ordered from ocuk
happy days
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom