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** The Official Nvidia GeForce 'Pascal' Thread - for general gossip and discussions **

Associate
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Not long to go it seems until the usual suspects are briefed on the new consumer Pascal cards. Jayz2cents hinting about a undisclosed event in the coming week/s and the fella from TweakTown mentioning he expects more info before/during Computex. Bring it on, we can then put away all the speculation and enjoy the facts that only NVIDIA really know. Even if it's a paper launch at least we will have the real info in the next 1-2 months.
 
Man of Honour
Joined
13 Oct 2006
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In recent years the use of VRAM has actually spiked really high in such a short time. Knowing that Pascal and Polaris should allow for even more players to achieve a good 4K and VR performance for more reasonable price - 8 GB won't be enough, and I don't think 8 GB of HBM2 memory will change anything, because in that case it would mean that system requirements of games for VRAM would drop a little bit in numbers, but that has never happened before, it only goes up. So I think that if they'd stay with 8GB or 12/16 GB of HBM 2, developers would quickly start creating even more, better looking, unoptimised games, just to pointlessly get the full use of it. And if it's really so much faster than GDDR5 or GDDR5X, then it'll be the end for both very soon.

Knowing that at the end of each generations, the high-end card usually ends up being a recommended card, in this case GTX 980 and 980 Ti has already been listed for recommended or ultra specs in a few games, means that GTX 1080 will reach that point before Q1 2017. In that case the card probably won't be any faster than 980Ti even with GDDR5X, or the requirements will jump up that much. Of course that could be the case only with stock speeds, as overclocking capabilities are still unknown.

Unless you are playing at 4K or beyond it actually for the most part hasn't - I spent awhile the other day playing with my 780, 970 and a 980ti at 2560x1440 the results were kind of interesting i.e. everbody's gone to the rapture the 780 was sitting at 2.6GB comfortably below its max, can't remember the 970 but I think it was 3.4GB while the 980ti was sitting at just below 5GB - so largely just caching/conservative garbage collection which from what I could see wasn't having any impact on performance in any realistic way (no additional slowdown or stutter moving into new areas, etc.). I see the same story with a lot of games i.e. the recent starwars battlefront game the 970 is sitting at like 3.6GB while the 780 is still just below its max VRAM with no real performance difference to speak of between them - that isn't to say it is always the story as there are 1-2 games that can truly utilise a lot of VRAM even at 1080p.
 
Soldato
Joined
7 Aug 2013
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3,510
In recent years the use of VRAM has actually spiked really high in such a short time.
Because next-gen consoles came out. We went from games being designed for consoles that had 512MB of memory to ones with 8GB(with about 5GB available for graphics).

There wont be any similar jumps anytime soon and we're going to see a far more gradual increase for the next few years at least.

Knowing that Pascal and Polaris should allow for even more players to achieve a good 4K and VR performance for more reasonable price - 8 GB won't be enough
I'm not sure why you think that, though.

and I don't think 8 GB of HBM2 memory will change anything, because in that case it would mean that system requirements of games for VRAM would drop a little bit in numbers, but that has never happened before, it only goes up.
Requirements for games are usually always conservative, if not completely inaccurate. And HBM2 will only be used on the bigger, more expensive cards. Devs will still have to take GDDR5 users into account when labeling requirements, even though people with HBM2 wont actually need as much as stated.

So I think that if they'd stay with 8GB or 12/16 GB of HBM 2, developers would quickly start creating even more, better looking, unoptimised games, just to pointlessly get the full use of it. And if it's really so much faster than GDDR5 or GDDR5X, then it'll be the end for both very soon.
You're really losing me here. I'm sorry to be harsh, but that whole first sentence is barely coherent and doesn't make any sense.

Developers will continue to make better looking games. And if anything, spiking vRAM on GPU's all round would probably lead to lazier memory optimizations, not the other way around. We already kind of see it now, with some games asking for a lot more vRAM than the visuals justify. No reason to make the situation worse. 8GB is a lot of vRAM to play with anyways, even of GDDR5. 8GB of HBM2 is going to be quite sufficient for most people.
 
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bru

bru

Soldato
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kent
32GB of HBM. I know it will happen one day, but how is our machines gonna fill it, well from HDD/SSD because not many of us have 32GB of Ram for it to be filled from. Of course the more GPU memory the more stuff can be cached for latter use, but we know how people don't like GPU's 'using' more than they actually 'need' too.
 
Caporegime
Joined
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hmm so this time round nvidia will have better performance on battlefield 5. interesting how they Dice have gone to nvidia this time from amd.
 
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