VRAM - AMD/Nvidia, why does it differ?

Tonester0011 · 18 Dec 2013 at 21:48

Lol

Matt, where have you gone?

TheRealDeal · 18 Dec 2013 at 21:50

Rusty0611 said:
Found the quote:

He's not the only one who says this though.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/365827-33-what-vram

Rusty0611 · 18 Dec 2013 at 21:56

TheRealDeal said:
He's not the only one who says this though.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/365827-33-what-vram

Confused - ain't that what we've been saying all along though?

Gregster · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:02

TheRealDeal said:
He's not the only one who says this though.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/365827-33-what-vram

So either Matt is wrong with this:

I guess you don't understand how it works. None of those graphs show the minimums so unless you read it via the translate you wouldn't know if the limit was exceeded or not. Have a read.

http://www.legitreviews.com/nvidia-g...ra-hd_130055/6

Quote:
The AMD Radeon R9 290X doesn’t have the best average clock speed, but it should be noted that the card never fully stalled when running with these aggressive image quality settings. The EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti SC ran the benchmark great except for one spot near the start of the benchmark run where more than 3GB of frame buffer was being used and the card fell on its face and the game froze for a full two seconds.

Or Matt was wrong with this:

LtMatt said:
If you read the sweclockers review it sounds like something that occurs, the performance loss, the longer you play. Picking it up to play for a few minutes might not be enough. Plus the fact hes using four gpu's might skew the results somehow. This is why they cannot be taken as gospel. You either match it up like for like or don't bother. Its pretty easy to run the same test with the same cards, if you want. Doesn't matter how you think performance will show itself when vram runs out. Multiple sites are saying it shows itself as a performance drop (much lower minimums than 3gb+ cards Sweclocks+HardOCP) and others are saying it presents itself as stuttering (HARDOCP+PCPER). Only you or Greg are saying the only way it shows itself is you drop down to single digit fps. As neither of you are able to test a 2gb card now, maybe things have changed somewhat regarding the way it works thanks to driver/OS improvements, faster DRAM and faster SSD pagefiles. If it was one site saying it fair enough, but too many decent sites are singing the same tune now.

Me and Rusty have experienced what happens when you run out of VRAM (I am surprised you haven't with your 6870 as well in truth) and we both got a slideshow of 0 fps but Matt told us we was wrong and it doesn't work that way but then Matt quotes Legitreviews experiencing the same as me and Rusty and he quotes it for truth....

Anyways, no point dragging this out further, as I am sure Matt is a little embarrassed

TheRealDeal · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:06

I thought people were saying all along that frames would tank to zero or at least single digits. After reading around a bit some people think that if your pushing your graphics memory to far it can be shown in stutters but if you go a good bit over it will show itself in a massive frame drop. I don't think it's a given running out of memory will show itself in the same way all the time. One guy said kepler cards may go straight to paging your hdd instead of system ram if it thinks you don't have enough system ram. Some are saying they get drops into the teens. It's all over the place what people say about vram being breached.

It needs more clarification in my opinion. People might not be relating there stutter to pushing there vram as they think it would result in 0 fps.

Rusty0611 · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:10

I tanked as soon as exceeding to be honest. Plenty of system RAM and an SSD. Obviously it's hard to test on 7900 as 3GB is a bugger to exceed.

I did exceed once in Skyrim with a ridiculous amount of mods on my 7950 and it was the same thing... make of that what you will.

No problems with reading around but it's important to not draw conclusions based on anecdotal evidence of people saying this maybe happens, and this happens maybe because of this. I prefer people to say what actually happens in what situation with evidence showing.

Ze famous Vega video illustrates it.

MooMoo444 · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:14

I ran out of VRAM frequently on Skyrim with my 770 2Gb. The game would crawl and stutter very frequently. Pauses of 0.5 sec or so. It was the reasoning behind me getting my first 780.

It's probably similar in other games, but it's difficult to break 3 at 1080p. Might have more of a problem when I get my 1440p monitor.

Rusty0611 · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:15

MooMoo444 said:
I ran out of VRAM frequently on Skyrim with my 770 2Gb. The game would crawl and stutter very frequently. Pauses of 0.5 sec or so. It was the reasoning behind me getting my first 780.

It's probably similar in other games, but it's difficult to break 3 at 1080p. Might have more of a problem when I get my 1440p monitor.

Yeah. That's exactly what I had at 1440p with my 7950 when purposefully trying to exceed the VRAM limit. So good to know it isn't different for AMD/nVidia cards in this game at least.

TheRealDeal · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:16

Rusty0611 said:
I tanked as soon as exceeding to be honest. Plenty of system RAM and an SSD. Obviously it's hard to test on 7900 as 3GB is a bugger to exceed.

I did exceed once in Skyrim with a ridiculous amount of mods on my 7950 and it was the same thing... make of that what you will.

No problems with reading around but it's important to not draw conclusions based on anecdotal evidence of people saying this maybe happens, and this happens maybe because of this. I prefer people to say what actually happens in what situation with evidence showing.

Ze famous Vega video illustrates it.

Yea i won't be drawing any conclusions. That's the good thing about pc's there is always testing to be done and new thoughts arise.

Gregster · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:21

FarCry 3 @ 5760x1080 I was playing and chucked all settings to max and fired up the game. Within seconds, the game froze for a couple of seconds and then stuttered along before freezing again. Checked GPU-z and max VRAM was 2120mb or something like that. It wasn't much over but it was over. It was apparently obvious what had happened prior to me looking at GPU-Z and this was first hand experience in running out.

Whilst the 680 is a great card, it clearly isn't designed for high resolution games and the 256 bit bus was just as bad as the 2GB of vram but for 1080P, it was never close to being exceeded. I remember going against Tonesters 7970's in BF3 at triple screens and he stomped all over me (that hurt) and no matter how high I clocked my lightnings, I couldn't beat his fps.

There comes a time though that VRAM can be overkill. Take a crappy 7870 and put 6GB on it and it would be a total waste. You still need some serious GPU grunt to be able to use the available VRAM and this is where I consider Maxwell/Pirate Islands? will be 4K ready more so than this gen.

The Titan is a powerful card but nobody wants to spend £3200 on GPU's to get 4K pumping out full details

(don't answer this Kaap).

TheRealDeal · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:28

Interesting quote from another site and probably something you guys know about. News to me though.

"This is actually what normally happens when you run out video memory (hitting a brick wall), it's just that BF3 bucks the trend by dynamically adjusting detail. I kept getting hitching in Clear Sky when I had my gtx260 even though the framerate was fine. when I started monitoring vram usage, it showed my vram was maxed every time I was hitching. I lowered one setting and never got that hitch again because I was using 20-25mb less vram."

I guess hitching could be seen as stutter and if games are lowering settings to compensate then it would make running out of vram different in these games.

Kaapstad · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:30

Tonester0011 said:
I was also told it doesn't happen straight away, you have to play the games longer than 30 seconds....LOL

Load up RTW2 change settings to 1600p maxed and start benchmark on a 2gb card, it is not a pretty sight and you probably won't even see enough to realise it is RTW2 trying to run.

It is like driving into a brick wall. :eek:

LtMatt · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:31

Shame you missed out the posts where i said running out of vram or running short of vram can show itself in several ways. Fps drops, stutters, fps tanking, stutter in frame time variance. This is all been shown on several tech sites, Swe clockers, pcper, hardocp etc. The links have been posted by myself, tommy and god knows who else several times. Its fine to forget those to try and prove a point though. Shame no one pulled up any of those quotes but then i wouldn't expect any different from the usual suspects. Always funny to see forum experts passing their opinion or findings off as fact whilst refusing to believe it can show itself in any other way despite numerous sites saying different, as well as people here who have experienced similar things themselves.

TheRealDeal said:
SNIP

Yep pretty much what ive said from the start, but that always gets forgotten here.

Gregster · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:32

I also remember running out of VRAM on my 1gb 560Ti and that doing the same thing as what FarCry3 did and back then, I was on a HDD and 4GB of ram, so no where to really scramble memory from. With FC3, I was on an SSD, so would expect using that as backup memory to handle it better.

Rusty0611 · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:36

OK Matt

.

TheRealDeal said:
Interesting quote from another site and probably something you guys know about. News to me though.

"This is actually what normally happens when you run out video memory (hitting a brick wall), it's just that BF3 bucks the trend by dynamically adjusting detail. I kept getting hitching in Clear Sky when I had my gtx260 even though the framerate was fine. when I started monitoring vram usage, it showed my vram was maxed every time I was hitching. I lowered one setting and never got that hitch again because I was using 20-25mb less vram."

I guess hitching could be seen as stutter and if games are lowering settings to compensate then it would make running out of vram different in these games.

Aye that's actually what I saw in BF3 / Skyrim so dunno

.

LtMatt · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:39

Rusty0611 said:
OK Matt .

When it comes to things like this most tech sites seem to be far more knowledgeable than people like you, me or god knows who else with all due respect. So ill tend to give their opinion on this a bit more credit than yours. Not saying yours is completely wrong, in some cases its probably right, but not all. The same as is my opinion on things basically.

Rroff · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:47

What happens when you run out of VRAM will depend a lot from game to game and the nature of the data access i.e. in some games even single digit MB over could bring the game to a shuddering stop and other games can shuffle a few 100 MB in and out with only a bit of an FPS hit - a lot will depend if your paging out to disc and/or how latency sensitive the data required is rather than the bandwidth of the system/memory bus(es).

humbug · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:47

Gregster said:
Do you not think that they are clocked at 1250Mhz because for a lot of cards, anything over results in a black screen? And in fact, it still seems that many have that without moving the memory and GPU/memory on stock clocks. It appears the memory clocks are at the max.

I don't why some are Black screening, i can speculate its the memory and if it is its getting to hot with a 95c cooler running miller meters away from the memory IC's, the GPU may be drawring power away from the memory IC's.

who knows. it maybe nothing to do with the Memory at all.

There is no reason why the memory can't run at whatever speed, we don't have much info on AIB 290's yet, 3 entry level ones as far as i can see and one of those is running 1350Mhz memory.

AIB's can come up with better cooling and PCB's if need be, no reason why we shouldn't see faster memory speeds. besides that there are many reference 290/X with overclock memory running just fine, if it wasn't for that it may be a valid point, but its not.

Those that are black screening need to be RMA'd as faulty, thats exactly what they are.

LtMatt · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:49

Rroff said:
What happens when you run out of VRAM will depend a lot from game to game and the nature of the data access i.e. in some games even single digit MB over could bring the game to a shuddering stop and other games can shuffle a few 100 MB in and out with only a bit of an FPS hit - a lot will depend if your paging out to disc and/or how latency sensitive the data required is rather than the bandwidth of the system/memory bus(es).

Pretty much all ive ever said from the start and plenty of sites say something similar, so i agree with you there Rroff.

Looking at a few of the previous replies i can feel siege mentality coming on so this will definitely be my last post in this thread.

Rusty0611 · 18 Dec 2013 at 22:59

Hey I'm just going on your quote mate. And by the looks of the other posts it looks like that's what others were going on too.

LtMatt said:
When it comes to things like this most tech sites seem to be far more knowledgeable than people like you, me or god knows who else with all due respect. So ill tend to give their opinion on this a bit more credit than yours. Not saying yours is completely wrong, in some cases its probably right, but not all. The same as is my opinion on things basically.

To be fair: most tech sites don't really know what they're going on about. I think most people on this forum will agree with that. And if they do know what they're going on about a lot of this then small proportion then massage things to suit their agenda to the point of making their original point nonsense. It makes it an utter minefield.

My opinion has always been the same on the matter. It doesn't flit between one and the other to suit the argument

.