I was just looking over this article on Guru Code: http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/8gb-sapphire-radeon-r9-290x-toxic.html about a 8GB craphics card. I am just curious... how much vid card memory do you really need for todays game applications? An if you do have, let's just say two GFX cards at 4GB apiece running SLI or CFX, how much of the memory is being utilized between both cards?
With 2 cards with 4GB vram, you will render frames with 4GB, only "twice" as fast (it actually depends on rendering method and different scaling per game or profile). vram is not doubled with cfx or sli. As for how much do you need: for what resolution? what game? Simply put: It depends.
I believe it was you who pointed out too me on another thread that have 2 cards, one@ 4GB an another@2GB running SLI/CFX, that you would only be using 2GB off of both cards (or even less) per gaming applications. But what if you have those 2 cards @4GB apiece SLI/CFX, would it be the same usage as I have stated above per gaming applications, or even less? Let's just keep it simple, we are using a standard 1920X 1080p REZ being that's the common REZ these days
No, it wasn't me, but it's true: with 2 cards with one with 2gb and the other with 4gb, only 2gb would be used. If both have 4, it's 4gb used to render the frames. As for full hd 1080p, I'm fairly sure 2GB are sufficient now, 3GB being a good compromise, except poorly optimized games like Watch Dogs with big texture sizes... also, more vram comes in handy with modded games like Skyrim. I'm happy I invested a ridiculous 100€ extra by the time to switch from 1.5GB to 3GB on my GTX580, and now my BF4 for instance is using 2GB... wouldn't work with a 1.5GB 580 I'm afraid. If I would have to buy a new graphics card right now, I'd probably look at the 4GB cards first. But that's my opinion, and at 1080p (which I plan to leave for 1440p with the next build) most people will tell you that 2GB is enough I guess. If anybody thinks different they will surely let us know
If a game is using 2GB of VRAM, that doesn't mean it requires 2GB of VRAM at least to run properly. It could run just as fine on a 1.5GB card.
There are several factors which determine the VRAM usage in a specific game - some of the most common are resolution, texture size and anti-aliasing. So running a game at 1440p instead of 1080p, Ultra textures instead of Normal textures and 4xMSAA instead of no AA could very well double the VRAM requirement (let's say 2GB vs 1GB). So even if you max out a game which would normally need 3GB of VRAM when you have 2GB, it will run but since the textures for that particular level where you're playing will have to be swapped out, it could cause FPS drops or just lower FPS in general. So it's difficult to say in general how much VRAM is required to run all games at maximum settings since it depends. I guess you could say that if you got a 6GB card you've covered 4K resolution in all games today. I suppose that 3GB would cover 95% of all games @ 1080p with 4xAA.
Well I'm talking about my experience, and trying to give some feedback to the op's question. What's your comment on the op's question? Any?
But you sure know how to give feedback against anybody else's experience. High quality feedback :thumbup:
