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Question about v-ram

Pighardia

Pighardia

Pighardia

Soldato
Joined
9 Jan 2011
Posts
17,987
I finally got round to crossfiring my 5850's yesterday. Very happy with the performance:D
I am using a twin frozer and a sapphire, getting some great results at 1920x1080, which is slight overkill tbh.
A friend of mine saw it today and said that he would like to upgrade to this set up from a 5770. But for the same money he could get a 480 or a 6950.

Now, crossfire 5850's benchmark better than a 480 or 6950, but i was wondering, as i believe that memory is mirrored rather than increased how important would the extra vram be?
I told him that he was better off getting a 480 or 6950, but now i am wondering about my set up:rolleyes:
How likely is it that to max out games in the near future, i will need more than 1gb?

cheers.
 
Well it depends really, if you adding high amounts of anti aliasing for a start i mean 8x or higher then the vram useage starts go very high whereas some games as default can use high amounts and i would say he is best getting a 6950 single for now.


Crysis with 16xQAA very high at 1920x1200 uses 1.3gb vram if i remember for example.
 
I'm sure there was an article on Tom's Hardware showing that anything over 4x AA wasn't as noticeable as the jump from none to 4x.

Why push your system for such little gain? Just stick to 4x and you'll be fine.
 
i usually just go for 4xAA in everything. Will probably try more now that i have crossfir set up though. Is AA the main usage of vram then? With these benchmarks, it is all about fps, but i was wondering how v-ram fits in to it?
 
As far as I'm aware, some poorly optimised games hog VRAM (see GTA IV) but other than that, 1GB should be plenty as long as you're not cranking up the anti-aliasing.

Results will vary from game to game, so the best thing to do is try 8x AA on each game, and if it runs fine, great. To be honest, anti-aliasing isn't as important at 1920 x 1080 as it is at lower resolutions, so settling for 4x is hardly a big deal.
 
For now and for the foreseeable future, 1GB should be plenty unless you, like Sycho and Tediore say, put on a lot of AA for almost no visual improvement. Different story if you use SSAA, but I'm not sure if that's even in the drivers anymore for most cards. :)
 
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