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is 2gb not enough?

robertchalmers1 said:
Thnx all this has arose after a deal for 2 x 7950s fell thru when the guy selling realised that he could get more for 1 card than I was giving him for 2. Guess thats all down to this stupid mining thing going on at the moment
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Ahhh unlucky. TBH i very much doubt you will be dissappointed with a single good card. The 780/290p's are beastly. Even if benchmarks suggest more grunt, if you are already well over the refresh rate of your screen, i cant imagine you would see much real life gain with two 770's over a 780 or 290p.
 
2gb is fine at the moment but I would not be buying a 2gb card if I was buying a card now.

2 gb might be fine for a bit but it depends how games go with all the ram now available in consoles. IE Killzone uses 3gig of the ps4s ram for graphics.

Assetto Corsa uses 2.6 gig on my PC and AA is off, 50+ fps. AMD 7950 BTW
 
Cd0gz said:
2gb is fine at the moment but I would not be buying a 2gb card if I was buying a card now.

2 gb might be fine for a bit but it depends how games go with all the ram now available in consoles. IE Killzone uses 3gig of the ps4s ram for graphics.

Assetto Corsa uses 2.6 gig on my PC and AA is off, 50+ fps. AMD 7950 BTW
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diffirent gpu's use diffirent amounts of vram in games, not too long ago there was a graph circulating around these forums where bf4 used a couple hundred mb of vram more on an amd card than the nvidia one with neither hitting their ceiling.
 
I still dont understand why if 2gb ir not enough then why do nvidia still charge as much as 400+ for 2gb cards. I would hatento think I would spend 450 on the evga classified 2gb 770 to find in 6 months time it wouldnt run games properly
 
While I doubt the vram thing is gonna trouble you within the next 6 months, I honestly think you should just aim for a 780/290.
They're not far off your current budget and would certainly last longer and provide a better experience with your triple screen racing.

£450 for a 770? No thanks mate. 290 and a waterblock please :)
 
Stas823 said:
diffirent gpu's use diffirent amounts of vram in games, not too long ago there was a graph circulating around these forums where bf4 used a couple hundred mb of vram more on an amd card than the nvidia one with neither hitting their ceiling.
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Was this a 2gb card vs a 3gb?

It was mentioned in another post on this thread that a game will use the extra memory to cache. Not sure what effect this will have on the game though.
 
Vram in a way is all about managing your expectations. For instance i only have a 1gb card atm but it handles most games at acceptable settings to get the fps i want. I don't play much AAA games these days so it's enough for me atm. When i used to play AAA shooters i upgraded quit a bit but mainly for more Gpu grunt. However if i wanted to play full on settings @ 1200p in this years games i would not buy a 2gb card with the new Gen consoles out. 3gb would make me feel more comfortable as i feel Ram is about to spike up because of this. Those with 2gb cards will still be able to play even if this is the case as i can still play pretty good settings on 1gb.
 
TAZOO7 said:
Because that data has to go somewhere, and the hit will vary from system to system depending on your hardware, also a lot depends on the game too, but most games will try and use system memory first, and then SSD/HDD

So in short the difference could be an acceptable drop in FPS that you can live with or slideshow or just come to a standstill and crash

Personally id rather fine tune my settings and avoid and Vram issues if its an issue
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Nope. Once you run out of VRAM it will flood your system memory, which no matter how fast is still chronically slow, and then once you hit the SSD it's indefinitely game over.

Neither of which matter though, as the hit on performance once you've overflown will be totally unplayable. Going through system memory is painful, it's not like it's directly communicating with the PCI bus either, it's got to go through DX and account for various other overheads, so once it's arrived where it needs to be it's travelling way below peak memory bandwidth anyway.

Once you're exceeding VRAM limits, it's game over. No other way around it other than to either dial it down or get a new card for the game in question.
 
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Thing is I dont really have any experiance of pc gaming to compare games on. My son has a pc that has a gigabyte hd 7970 and that plays any game on his steam account fine by the looks of things and wouldnt be too unhappy with a couple of those myself. Other than that whatever I buy will be based on recommendations from anyone/someone on this site.
 
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