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VRAM - AMD/Nvidia, why does it differ?

MooMoo444

MooMoo444

MooMoo444

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Why are AMD always so generous with VRAM and nvidia so conservative?

I mean 3Gb is very borderline for some games at 1080p, and actually not enough for some at 1440p.

those resolutions are no problem for 290/290x with 4Gb, so why are nvidia always holding back in that regard?

If you take another of their "top end" cards, the 580, 1.5gb was arguably not enough at release, let alone shortly afterwards.

I know someone will probably mention how 'generous' they were with the Titan, but that's not exactly a card aimed at everyone and was more of a peen flexing exercise by nvidia than an actual sensible card release.
 
Because all Nvidia care about is leeching as much profit out of the customers as possible, the shareholders are loving it.
 
MooMoo444 said:
Why are NVidia always so generous with VRAM and AMD so conservative?

I mean 4Gb is very borderline for some games at 5780x1080, and actually not enough for some at 4K.

those resolutions are no problem for the Titan with 6Gb, so why are AMD always holding back in that regard?
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Fixed.

You can make the same argument about both AMD and NVidia depending on where they are targeting their cards.
 
I already pointed out the Titan is an outlier and shouldn't really be considered. It's completely unrealistic and out of 99.999% of peoples price range.

I am simply comparing what you get for your money at the £350-550 price bracket.
 
two00lbwaster said:
Nvidia can to lopsided RAM allocations so it makes the line regarding bus bit width a bit hazy.
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There is no point going overboard with more than 2gb/256bit buses with the NVidia GK104 based cards. The GK104 chips are not as fast/powerful as their Tahiti counterparts and were intended for use as midrange cards originally. That's the real problem with GK104, the chips are underpowered.
 
MooMoo444 said:
I already pointed out the Titan is an outlier and shouldn't really be considered. It's completely unrealistic and out of 99.999% of peoples price range.

I am simply comparing what you get for your money at the £350-550 price bracket.
Click to expand...

That's a bad argument though putting a price on it (extra VRAM costs money) and £350 may be ok for you but it could be out of my price bracket.
 
Kaapstad said:
There is no point going overboard with more than 2gb/256bit buses with the NVidia GK104 based cards. The GK104 chips are not as fast/powerful as their Tahiti counterparts and were intended for use as midrange cards originally. That's the real problem with GK104, the chips are underpowered.
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I was just pointing out that the rule isn't as hard and fast as you'd assume.

And putting unreasonable amounts of RAM onboard that the card will never fully utilise doesn't usually stop AMD/Nvidia AIBs from putting 1/2GB of RAM on low end cards. It's usually DDR3 at that too!
 
You ***** that one up Kap, there was the 6GB 7970 Toxic.;):p

In answer to the op, it's called fleecing your customers, give them just enough so that they have to upgrade next gen.;)

The loudest shouters of 'it's plenty' have all moved up from 2GB to 3GB gpus now, nudge nudge;);)
 
The RAM roughly correlates to the RAM usage of the settings that card can run.

So if you take BF3 at 5760x1080 then a single 680 is not going to push high enough frame rates at max settings (which will exceed 2GB without Windows Aero disabled) for it to be a real world scenario.

Although having 4GB in this scenario to alleviate the VRAM bottleneck would achieve this, the FPS would still be way too low to make this a playable situation.

Although games use more VRAM now compared to say two years ago, the ability of those same cards to push out acceptable frame rates has obviously remained constant.

A lot of people who say blindly that 2GB isn't/wasn't enough aren't very intelligent and tend to ignore the correlation between the processing power of the card (and its ability to push acceptable frame rates) and the amount of memory it has.
 
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Kaapstad said:
Fixed.

You can make the same argument about both AMD and NVidia depending on where they are targeting their cards.
Click to expand...

MooMoo444 said:
I already pointed out the Titan is an outlier and shouldn't really be considered. It's completely unrealistic and out of 99.999% of peoples price range.

I am simply comparing what you get for your money at the £350-550 price bracket.
Click to expand...

Nvidia recommend 780SLI or higher for 4k, but as we know 3gb is not enough vram for this resolution, at least in all situations.

Nvidia said:
NVIDIA GPU SUPPORT FOR 4K RESOLUTIONS

All GeForce GTX 600 and 700 series GPUs can support 4K resolutions through DisplayPort. The NVIDIA driver automatically detects 4K 60Hz tiled format, so no special user set up is required. In order to power games at this resolution with settings turned up NVIDIA recommends GTX 780 SLI
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Source
https://developer.nvidia.com/4k-ultra-high-resolution-development

Nvidia said:
4K truly is the next big thing, and once you’ve seen and experienced its awesomeness you’ll never want to go back to plain Jane resolutions ever again. If you value your ‘enthusiast gamer’ badge and like to think of yourself as having the best of the best in PC gear, then you need a 4K system. You owe it to yourself. Unleash your SLI system and experience a future console gamers can only dream of.

If you’re new to the PC party, GeForce GTX SLI systems are the only way to experience 4K smoothly and stutter free, a fact verified by PC Perspective’s recent review of 4K gaming
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Source Geforce.co.uk
http://www.geforce.co.uk/whats-new/...k-revolution-the-next-big-thing-for-pc-gamers

Its actually quite funny when you look back at the Nvidia PR smear started just prior to Hawaii launch targeting AMD's 4k Performance, smoothness and other issues such as interleaved frames, tearing etc. Only for then Hawaii to launch with Hardware Frame Pacing, its own 4K Vesa standard and nullify all the problems in one hit. Not to mention the fact that at 4k the Hawaii card is superior in terms of grunt, frame pacing and vram.

Source
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...-Surround-Single-and-Multi-GPU-Configurations
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/new...rketing-offensive-ahead-of-hawaii-launch.aspx
http://www.overclock.net/t/1427828/bsn-state-of-4k
 
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670 user here with only 2gb of memory, not had any problems with any games so far to do with vram @ 1920x1200.

Granted more is always better value with regards to memory, but by the time i get any vram issues i will have upgraded anyway, and can you imagine the increase in cost of an nvidia card with 4gb or 6gb vram :eek:

There are lots of factors to take into consideration in making a good / cool / quiet / fast / power efficient graphics card, and the amount of vram size makes no difference to me presently.
 
MooMoo444 said:
That wouldn't make sense though, otherwise in reality nobody would ever bother with SLI or CF.
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The exception is of course multi-GPU but that is a relatively small portion of the market. Sorry I thought that was kind of obvious from the angle I was coming from. Apparently not. :p

But you're right in that by going SLI/CF you double (for arguments sake) your processing power but not your VRAM. It's here that the line becomes more blurred but on single card at the normal resolutions the correlation I described largely holds true.
 
It could be said,

Why dont amd and nvidia make more powerful gpu's so there is no need to sli / xfire.

As tommybhoy said 'it's called fleecing your customers, give them just enough so that they have to upgrade next gen' , obviously AMD would not fleece its customers as they are the savior of pc gaming :D
 
Nelly said:
Because all Nvidia care about is leeching as much profit out of the customers as possible, the shareholders are loving it.
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:D

Very true. Which company doesn't want to make profit though? Guess it's more about the way they go about it which annoys people though. For me, I couldn't care less.
 
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