Hi, it is true that GTX 970s have only 3.5 GB of VRAM? Why am I suffering from serious microstuttering and framerate drops issues while playing Watch Dogs with texture on Ultra, when it says they only consume 3 GB? And finally, how many VRAM does it have the PS4? Thank you.
GTX 970 has 3.5GB that is capable of its full advertised speed and 512mb at a crippled slower speed. The PS4 has 8GB GDDR5 which is shared by the GPU and CPU.
Memory isn't everything. It has a full 4GB of vram ans Calculus stated, just 512MB is running at a reduced priority. That is not what is causing your problems. Even if you had 12GB of full speed ram you would still get those drops if it's not using more than 4GB currently. It's the gpu itself that isn't powerful enough to run every game at max settings. Or if you are running on a slow hd it can take some time to pull the textures from the disk occasionally. As for the ps4, it has no vram. Just 8GB system ram that is shared by the whole system.
He specifically mentions microstutter with textures on ultra. That can be his card hitting the slower 512MB. If the stutters go away at a lower texture setting, then the card can run the game fine, and the issue is the VRAM. The PS4 has an HSA-like memory implementation. The CPU and the GPU parts of the system access the memory at different speeds (20GB/sec for the CPU and 170GB/sec for the GPU), but they have common access to the same memory and no asset/code duplication is needed if they both work on the same thing. Actual games access 5GB of that memory directly, and they can also indirectly use parts of the rest of it through the OS's memory manager.
Check with afterburner if you're getting memory capped. If yes, then probably, if not, then nope. Personally I have a 970 and I don't remember staying near the cap, but that was at 1080p maybe you have a higher res.
Please do not rely on your experience with Watch Dogs. There's engine issue with this game that never got fixed. Everyone had stutter.
Thank you all for all the responses. Yes, stutters dissapear almost entirely when I set textures to "high". I play at 1080p but I'm seriously thinking on updating to a GTX 1070 in order to try to reach 2K/4K or at least get a stable framerate at 1080p (with textures on Ultra, of course).
I was just going to bring this up. Watch Dogs is a terrible game to measure your performance with. The 3.5 + 0.5 970 memory issue was beaten to death 18 months ago. The card's too slow for it to matter. A new card won't fix Watch Dogs. That game runs like crap on Ultra. Google it.
Tried W_D with both 970 and 980Ti. Stuttering is gone on the 980Ti but if it's due to it having 6GB of RAM or me running on an i7 or the game being patched...idk.
I have had games maxed out at 4+gb of vram but my main physical ram went over 10gb, if I lower the res,etc, lower physical ram is being used up, what seems to be happening is that the main physical ram is swapping the for the gpu and that's not kinda good, even though I am on an octa-channel setup. Depending on game of course.
looking at gpu-z i have two games that needs 4gb memory and my evga 970 ssc has no problems running.my 2 cents
I use 2 GTX970s in SLI at 4K and have only experienced the shuttering issue a few times due to VRAM limitations. And it was mostly due to GTAV and poor initial optimization. Oddly it wasn't even when my VRAM hit over 3.5GB but when I was nearing 5GB in use(4GB on the card and 1GB in system RAM). With most games, currently un-rendered or soon to be rendered textures will be cached in the VRAM. This effect can cause the card to go over 3.5GB in some games and even above the 4GB total. However, the drivers optimizations for most games will use the slower 512MB portion and anything else for caching and the full speed 3.5GB for currently rendered. Doing this will prevent micro-shuttering in nearly every case, except if the game is poorly optimized. Unfortunately this does mean that some games(Watch Dogs) can experience the issue due to poor optimization. But, try experimenting with other settings also. It is possible that the issue could be due to lack of raw power to render everything maxed out(Watch Dogs is rough on most cards).
Watchdogs must be hard on the graphics card.I play Rise of the Tombraider and Shadow of Mordor at ultra settings with no problems....strange
Its not only Watch Dogs, its the same with Quantum Break with everything at ultra. (and dying light if you dont have certain patch). I dont have any issues with WD at 1080p though.
