Crossfire RAM Usage.

Eambo · **Crossfire RAM Usage. -** 06-22-2012, 15:14 | posts: 100

'ello everyone!

Hopefully some Guru's can answer this one. I have always been under the understanding, and possibly wrongly, that the RAM limitation on GPU's in Crossfire is decided by the primary card. From what I understood, the second is simply number crunching, and the RAM is unused. Am I wrong in this thinking?

If not, if I had a 2GB primary card and a 1GB secondary, would this work? Or would it be restricted to 1GB on both?

Looking to upgrade my primary card if it would improve my high resolution gaming :-) Thanks everyone!

Pandora's Box · 06-22-2012, 15:15 | posts: 21 | Location: Cleveland, Ohio

Restricted to 1GB

lucidus · 06-22-2012, 15:41 | posts: 3,157 | Location: UAE

Clocks and Ram are decided by the lowest available, not which is occupying the first slot.

automaticman · 06-22-2012, 17:47 | posts: 663 | Location: Orange County, CA

The RAM in both cards is in use, and are copies of each other. They both store all of the texture files etc to be available for frames that card is working on.

Eambo · 06-25-2012, 10:19 | posts: 100

Thanks for the responses, I figured I wasn't understanding how crossfire worked correctly :-)

rogue221979 · 06-29-2012, 23:15 | posts: 471 | Location: Oxford maine

Yup you have 1 Gig of ram regardless if each card has 1. My setup is simalier to yours. Now if you use MSI afterburner to monitor your fps temps and ram usage you will see it reporting 2 gigs of ram uses or higher. (Higher means your runing out of ram.)

Just divide that number and you'll see what your actual ram usage is.

Our cards are still good, its just they run out of memory on big games like Skyrim and BF3 which produces stuttering.

GotNoRice · 06-30-2012, 00:23 | posts: 80 | Location: Pleasant Hill, California

If you are running out of VRam and use AA, consider enabling the edge-detect filter. That will make use of extra stream processors for AA calculations and place less burden on the Video Memory.

Shaneus · 06-30-2012, 01:12 | posts: 235 | Location: Geelong, Australia

Quote:

Originally Posted by GotNoRice

If you are running out of VRam and use AA, consider enabling the edge-detect filter. That will make use of extra stream processors for AA calculations and place less burden on the Video Memory.

Good tip! I find downsampling helps, too. I might be wrong but it looks like it uses less VRAM when using less AA and a higher res (I use 1440p on a 1080p screen) than using a higher AA. But the edge-detect thing could come in handy as well.