GTX 980 amount of vram ?

But where do you draw the line where that type of memory performance is unacceptable? If I released a game tomorrow that uses 500gb of vram at 1080p, could I say that 8GB cards aren't enough, we need 501GB cards or bust?

Or what if tomorrow Nvidia announces they are supporting 128xMSAA and suddenly no game is playable at that setting because VRAM usage exceeds even 8GB? Like where do you draw the line? Especially with examples like Hitman. Which while a decent looking game is hardly better looking than titles that use far less VRAM at 4K.

 

Just going to leave this here:

 

GTX680/770 have 192GB/s memory bandwidth, in very beautiful scenario every texture has to be loaded only once per frame (which is rare as same texture is bound to multiple objects to conserve vRAM use).
In case you utilize 2GB of vRAM you may need 1.5GB of data to render one frame (as rest may be different buffers, values for gpu particles, ...) you can get from memory limitation 192/1.5 = 128 fps max.
With 4GB version of card you can get to point where you need 3.5GB of data 192/3.5 = 55fps max.
And what if someone felt need to have 8GB of vRAM on such bandwidth:
5.4GB scenario - 192/5.4 = 35fps max
6.6GB scenario - 192/6.6 = 29fps max
7.4GB scenario - 192/7.4 = 26fps max
In AFR SLI mode bandwidth requirements would be same. In case each card renders part of same image this limitation would be lower as not every card would need to load all textures.

And yes in reality there are textures which are not present in viewport therefore would not be needed. But there are textures which are used multiple times therefore loaded multiple times.
This is just to show that 8GB of vRAM paired with 256bit bus have big limitations anyway if used for other than precaching purpose.

 

Right now the vast majority of people have 1GB and 2GB cards and developers are taking that into account. But I can assure you that as more and more cards are being released with 4GB of vRAM the standard will shift.
How fast this will happen depends on the industry and future technologies.
I'm guessing that by the time that mid-range cards can handle 4K resolutions that 4 or even 6 GB becomes the standard.

An interesting development to look forward to is DX12, which allows some sort of unified memory architecture to use system RAM to store textures, such that the video cards can do with much less. Perhaps 4GB will be the standard for many years to come and is 8GB the peak of what you'll ever need in the most extreme settings. But this is really speculating.

 

That little chart of yours is extremely biased and misleading.

In the last 30mins I've checked out 17 - yes, SEVENTEEN - of the links in it and none of them demonstrate performance loss due to lack of vram as u claim.
They show quite the opposite actually, lack of GPU power or no real difference at all.




A couple of examples of your links that YOU posted;


















Nuff said?

 

Do you suggest there is some measurable difference in memory bandwidth in those graphs?
Or that one of those cards does not have 512bit memory interface?

And this... haven't you heard of AGP texturing/AGP memory?
And here is another why you do not need even 1GB of vRAM unless you are developer who wants to use more.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2008/11/03/detail-textures.aspx
I remember this to be for 1st time used in "soldier of fortune".
And with proper shaders...

 

If you check my earlier quote of the same statement, that's exactly what he said. He's since edited it out.

 

Altough Pill Monster had to use cancerous troll memes, he stated it perfectly.


This benchmark looks suspicious, that 20 fps drop seems really weird to me.

 

You don't know what the fuk you're babbling on about, that's clear from the top post, the other thing that's pretty clear is that you're also the OP.



I think we've had enough of this crap.

 

What does this has to do with the post I made?

 

If you're referring to my list of references to games that have known vRAM limitations, then:

1. Tomb Raider was never on my list.

2. That Far Cry 3 graph shows that a 2GB card cannot handle the settings a 4GB card could, so what is your point? If you'd have better cards with 2GB of memory you still wouldn't be able to play that game at those settings. If you had better cards with 4GB of memory then you could.
We fired up the Sharp 4K monitor to do some 4K testing at 3840×2160. We know from our benchmarking that running a multi-monitor setup at 57×10 or a 4K monitor at 38×21 needs more than 2GB to avoid stuttering on both AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards.

3. You quoted the wrong graph on that page, you should've looked at this one:

It clearly shows that the 2GB cards show reduced performance in comparison with the same card with 3GB or 4GB of memory.

4. Again what the ****? You've quoted the wrong picture again. You should've posted the one I posted in here before, which shows the limitations of 4GB cards @ 5760x1200:


5. Seriously? A bunch of troll pictures to show what a moron you are?

So okay, you obviously don't have a clue what you're talking about and I can't deal with this kind of mindless behaviour...
You've been added to my ignore list.

 

That is what a genuine vRAM limitation looks like. Please, I've explained what the effects of vRAM limitations are here. Or you can google the effect of vRAM limitations yourself if you want to understand them.

 

They are YOUR OWN LINKS!

And I wouldn't worry about the ignore list.

 

Also another flawed thing is that the 8gb version of the r9 290x does not exist in the US that I could find only in the UK. Someone correct me if I am wrong. If i am correct then it is kind of unfair to compare a card that is only available in one country to a card that is available pretty much world wide.

 

The point is that 28 FPS isn't stellar performance. In fact, it's so low that those settings aren't practical any more. Once you lower the AA once notch both cards perform exactly the same again.

 

The cards are identical (they both have a 512 bit memory bus), but you see that in the first benchmark the 8GB performs slightly worse. I'm suggesting that this can be the case due to the same memory bus having to deal with 8GB of allocation space instead of 4GB.
You were saying that having more vRAM brings along bandwidth limitations, but we see from the chart that the same card with 4 or 8 GB of vRAM performs roughly the same on a 512 bit memory bus. I don't know of any cards that have 8GB of memory and a 256-bit memory bus, perhaps they will never make them and always use a 512 bit bus. More vRAM does not necessarily mean a bandwidth limitation. It's the same story as with PCI-E2.0 versus PCI-E3.0. Even in the most extreme cases it barely makes a difference. The amount of available bandwidth simply doesn't have to be fully used.

I doubt that article from 2008 is still relevant. Games engine today are much more advanced, if they could've achieved CryEngine quality with just 1GB of vRAM I'm sure someone would've had already done it.

 

Fair enough, altough I barely see the point when it runs **** anyway on 8GB too.

And one game has +20 fps, while all the other games barely see the +5 fps mark.
Dunno why you're still defending this point. 4GB is more than enough for 4k for now.

 

The 4gb card ran out of vram. The 8gb card while having enough vram ran out of gpu power. The 8gb card is not at a playable framerate for the vast amount of gurus. My 680ftw 4gb ran out of gpu power well before vram which is why sold them.

 

How is vulture not banned yet? He even called a fellow guru "moron" now. Guess that's what one does when they run out of arguments.