[Techno-Kitchen] GTX1060 3GB has major VRAM bottlenecks in Forza Horizon 3 & Mirror's Edge Catalyst

[tential]

Yeah, I agree. It will depend on the individual use case but generally if you're gaming and intend to keep the card for 2+ years I wouldn't consider a 3GB or 4GB card when for a little extra you can get the 6GB or 8GB version.

Drink off brand beer for a week and you've already covered the difference

Again I feel like we're telling people to do something they do not want to do. I'm not saying the advice isn't sound but when people make their mind up to spend money in a certain way or do something in a certain way you pretty much have to work in those constraints. You can talk until you're blue in the face about how people should spend more money and get the more vram option but I feel like this price bracket has shown time and time again that vram isn't a major issue.

In fact, it seems the lower price brackets primary concern seems to be picking a gpu that won't overpower the psu that they severely skimped on for some reason.

Rather than looking at it from the enthusiast side where we have proper hardware to run a wide range of hardware options, many people in the market for these gpus skimped on parts we never would have.

When the average person barely has a couple thousand dollars in liquid savings $30-50 dollars can be a big deal to a lot of gamers.

You're said spend an extra 50 and you can turn the settings up. A lot of gamers say, I can turn 1 setting down, save $50 use that to buy a couple of games, and still play the same games everyone else is playing.

Just different ways of viewing things.

No surprise that gaming enthusiasts are not always graphics enthusiasts or hardware enthusiasts and thus will not see the same value of upgrading as much as users on here will

 

[antihelten]

Then I'll disagree on the "for instance" part and note that this is pretty much the only instance that is obvious.

It's not the only obvious place, other obvious places include the flower box to the left of the crouching soldier (identical issue to the flower box I showed before), the shadow under the shoulder pad of the crouching soldier, and the gizmo lying to the left of dead soldier by the fountain. All of these clearly show different shadow/lighting between the 1060 6GB and the 460 4GB.

As for what we see, I'd speculate that this is an object with an imperfect wireframe and the Nvidia driver autocorrected that error, avoiding "backlighting" of that indented area.

Doubt it, there are three identical flower boxes in the scene, and if the wireframe was flawed then they should all show the same issue (since it's the same asset), but they don't.

Edit: On second thought you may still be correct. The fact that not all three flower boxes show similar shading doesn't preclude the wireframe being flawed, since the issue of backlighting of a surface would obviously depend upon the position of said surface relative to the light source, and since the three flower boxes are in three different position within the scene, this could possibly explain the difference.

Honestly that shadow looks wrong. Why would the top of the area be in shadow if the top of the part above it wasn't as well? The RX 460 version you can tell that it's a 3d object and extruding while it looks more flat on 1060.

Because the lightsource is placed above and behind the flowerbox, this way the top is lit up, but the front is in shadow. The easiest way to judge the position of the light source is probably to look at the shadow from the fountain.

 

[Bacon1]

Because the lightsource is placed above and behind the flowerbox, this way the top is lit up, but the front is in shadow. The easiest way to judge the position of the light source is probably to look at the shadow from the fountain.

Then why is the building in the back top left lit up? Honestly the lighting is coming from 3-4 directions if you look at the different angles of shadows, but basically its coming from the center top of the image. If the light was "above and behind the flower box" the shadow from the statue would be much lower and closer to the bottom of the column.

 

[antihelten]

Then why is the building in the back top left lit up? Honestly the lighting is coming from 3-4 directions if you look at the different angles of shadows, but basically its coming from the center top of the image. If the light was "above and behind the flower box" the shadow from the statue would be much lower and closer to the bottom of the column.

I'm not entirely sure which building you're referring to with "back top left", is it the leftmost one? if so only the roof of this one is lit whereas the front clearly lies in shadow. In fact the front of all 3 background buildings clearly lie in shadow, whereas their roofs are lit up.

Also what statue are you referring to? The only statues I can see are the ones on the corners of the roof of the building that is second from the left, and I don't see why those should be casting shadows anywhere near any columns.

Either way this is all way off topic, since we've already established that this comparison is useless for the topic at hand (VRAM limitations), so maybe we should take this to the GoW4 thread instead.

 

[Piroko]

Doubt it, there are three identical flower boxes in the scene, and if the wireframe was flawed then they should all show the same issue (since it's the same asset), but they don't.

Edit: On second thought you may still be correct. The fact that not all three flower boxes show similar shading doesn't preclude the wireframe being flawed, since the issue of backlighting of a surface would obviously depend upon the position of said surface relative to the light source, and since the three flower boxes are in three different position within the scene, this could possibly explain the difference.

Second thought from me as well, I did not notice that the furthest flower box in the 1060 6g screenshot shows the same issue with backlighted areas. Does that game have dynamic LOD? That could explain the mixed quality, with one scaled down wireframe having issues. That or we're seeing an issue with Tesselation or shader precision here. Another variable that could break benchmarks, heh

 

[Ansau]

As an owner of a gpu similarly balanced as the 1060 3GB I'll give my opinion. I have a r9 285 (oced to 1100/1500MHz), very similar because a 1060 3GB is about 50% faster while having 50% more VRAM.

This type of unbalanced gpus, not only are quickly outdated by vram limitations, they are frustrating as hell. As new games are released, you're more and more restricted with graphic settings, forced to tweak settings to avoid stutter or simply make the game playable, while knowing the gpu has enough raw performance for those games. It's a feeling like: you could, but you can't.
So far, I've managed to deal with games like GTA V or Hitman by lowering some of the settings I didn't want to, and the experience while gaming is less perfect as you tend to pay attention to draw distance or textures, as you know you . But things have turned up very badly since I started playing Forza Horizon 3. It's the first game that implores me to upgrade the gpu, and it's not because of lack of performance (I have solid 60fps in 1080p), but the lack of vram and the crashing/texture corruption due to system memory allocation. The funny thing is my gpu has become outdated is less than 2 years.

As a conclusion, for anyone who's willing to take the 1060 3gb, know that in some games you will be forced to lower settings or to have to abandon the glorious DSR, And that in 2018 you'll have to start to look for a new gpu. If you know for sure you'll be upgrading in 18-24 months, the 1060 3gb is a very good option. Otherwise, you either spend more money and get the full 1060 6GB/480 8GB, or you go for the 470 saving money and future troubles.

 

[antihelten]

Second thought from me as well, I did not notice that the furthest flower box in the 1060 6g screenshot shows the same issue with backlighted areas. Does that game have dynamic LOD? That could explain the mixed quality, with one scaled down wireframe having issues. That or we're seeing an issue with Tesselation or shader precision here. Another variable that could break benchmarks, heh

It could be a LOD issue, but in that case it's kind of weird that the 1060 6GB would suffer from it and not the 460 4GB.

I would say that if this is not a lighting/shadow issue on the 460 (due to the dynamic IQ system in GoW4), then it is most likely a driver issue with either AMD or Nvidia (depending upon which is the incorrect one), who for one reason or another is not rendering it properly.

But things have turned up very badly since I started playing Forza Horizon 3. It's the first game that implores me to upgrade the gpu, and it's not because of lack of performance (I have solid 60fps in 1080p), but the lack of vram and the crashing/texture corruption due to system memory allocation. The funny thing is my gpu has become outdated is less than 2 years.

Outright crashing and texture corruption sounds like more than just a simple VRAM issue. Normally running out of VRAM should results in framerate spikes (due to the added latency of going to system memory), and if it gets bad enough the frame rate will plummet down into the single digit territory. However if a game engine is properly programmed to handoff assets to system memory, then crashing and corruption issues shouldn't really happen.

Also what kind of settings are you running where you can get a solid 60 FPS on a 285? Must be pretty low settings, considering that a 280X gets 19 FPS on very high and 28 FPS on high, so to get 60 FPS on a 285 you must be running the game at low/medium settings, and I'm surprised that you would still have VRAM issues at that point.

 

[tential]

As an owner of a gpu similarly balanced as the 1060 3GB I'll give my opinion. I have a r9 285 (oced to 1100/1500MHz), very similar because a 1060 3GB is about 50% faster while having 50% more VRAM.

This type of unbalanced gpus, not only are quickly outdated by vram limitations, they are frustrating as hell. As new games are released, you're more and more restricted with graphic settings, forced to tweak settings to avoid stutter or simply make the game playable, while knowing the gpu has enough raw performance for those games. It's a feeling like: you could, but you can't.
So far, I've managed to deal with games like GTA V or Hitman by lowering some of the settings I didn't want to, and the experience while gaming is less perfect as you tend to pay attention to draw distance or textures, as you know you . But things have turned up very badly since I started playing Forza Horizon 3. It's the first game that implores me to upgrade the gpu, and it's not because of lack of performance (I have solid 60fps in 1080p), but the lack of vram and the crashing/texture corruption due to system memory allocation. The funny thing is my gpu has become outdated is less than 2 years.

As a conclusion, for anyone who's willing to take the 1060 3gb, know that in some games you will be forced to lower settings or to have to abandon the glorious DSR, And that in 2018 you'll have to start to look for a new gpu. If you know for sure you'll be upgrading in 18-24 months, the 1060 3gb is a very good option. Otherwise, you either spend more money and get the full 1060 6GB/480 8GB, or you go for the 470 saving money and future troubles.

We already did a thread on here showing people are not that interested in dsr specifically.

So if we're not using dsr on this forum, why are we expecting a person interested in a gtx 1060 to know about it or use it?

That's why I'm saying that you're focusing on metrics that most 1060 3gb users don't care about.

 

[frozentundra123456]

As an owner of a gpu similarly balanced as the 1060 3GB I'll give my opinion. I have a r9 285 (oced to 1100/1500MHz), very similar because a 1060 3GB is about 50% faster while having 50% more VRAM.

This type of unbalanced gpus, not only are quickly outdated by vram limitations, they are frustrating as hell. As new games are released, you're more and more restricted with graphic settings, forced to tweak settings to avoid stutter or simply make the game playable, while knowing the gpu has enough raw performance for those games. It's a feeling like: you could, but you can't.
So far, I've managed to deal with games like GTA V or Hitman by lowering some of the settings I didn't want to, and the experience while gaming is less perfect as you tend to pay attention to draw distance or textures, as you know you . But things have turned up very badly since I started playing Forza Horizon 3. It's the first game that implores me to upgrade the gpu, and it's not because of lack of performance (I have solid 60fps in 1080p), but the lack of vram and the crashing/texture corruption due to system memory allocation. The funny thing is my gpu has become outdated is less than 2 years.

As a conclusion, for anyone who's willing to take the 1060 3gb, know that in some games you will be forced to lower settings or to have to abandon the glorious DSR, And that in 2018 you'll have to start to look for a new gpu. If you know for sure you'll be upgrading in 18-24 months, the 1060 3gb is a very good option. Otherwise, you either spend more money and get the full 1060 6GB/480 8GB, or you go for the 470 saving money and future troubles.

Well again, as others have said, if you assume the 3gb 1060 will be so terrible that it has to be replaced in two years, I dont think you can assume the 470 4gb will not have issues as well, either from vram or sheer lack of processing power. I dont consider it a major issue though, for either card. They are both 200 dollar or cheaper gpus. If one wants to be relatively sure to be able to play demanding games in two or three years without a lot of compromises, especially with new consoles coming out, they will simply have to pony up for a more powerful class card, like the 1070 or higher. And I know the arguments that those who buy these cards cannot afford more expensive cards, so the cheap cards have to last a long time. As nice as that would be, that is simply not how things work. If one cant afford a more expensive card, they will have to make some compromises now, and more compromises as the card ages. But so what, the world is not going to end simply because one has to turn down some settings playing a video game.

 

[Ansau]

Outright crashing and texture corruption sounds like more than just a simple VRAM issue. Normally running out of VRAM should results in framerate spikes (due to the added latency of going to system memory), and if it gets bad enough the frame rate will plummet down into the single digit territory. However if a game engine is properly programmed to handoff assets to system memory, then crashing and corruption issues shouldn't really happen.

Also what kind of settings are you running where you can get a solid 60 FPS on a 285? Must be pretty low settings, considering that a 280X gets 19 FPS on very high and 28 FPS on high, so to get 60 FPS on a 285 you must be running the game at low/medium settings, and I'm surprised that you would still have VRAM issues at that point.

Yes, I'm playing at medium settings with textures at low.

I don't know if it's the game or a memory allocation issue. All I know is FH3 can allocate +2GB of vram in my system memory while not experiencing heavy stutter, I suppose this is due to how the game is designed as the xbox one has normal ddr3 for the vram.
There's not a path for the corruptions. Sometimes it happens within seconds, sometimes I can play for half an hour. Sometimes it's only with few things (like car copkit, rearviews or some tiny grass), sometimes it's the entire road or all IA cars. Having the vram split between gpu and system memory could potentially end up with memory issues, like allocation misses or conflicts.

We already did a thread on here showing people are not that interested in dsr specifically.

So if we're not using dsr on this forum, why are we expecting a person interested in a gtx 1060 to know about it or use it?

That's why I'm saying that you're focusing on metrics that most 1060 3gb users don't care about.

I don't know where you take that from, all I've found is people like DSR and specially VSR:
http://www.portvapes.co.uk/?id=Latest-exam-1Z0-876-Dumps&exid=threads/do-you-use-vsr-dsr-with-your-games-when-possible.2466549/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/456up8/who_uses_vsr/
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/3bz1bv/does_anyone_even_use_dynamic_super_resolution_dsr/

If not using such techniques people often use AA, which also consumes vram.
Anyway, this was just my opinion based on the experience of a gpu that has a similar performance/vram balance as the 1060 3GB. Also, you should stop talking for the potential users of this card, it just makes you pretentious and wrong about some claims you make by it, as I showed.

Well again, as others have said, if you assume the 3gb 1060 will be so terrible that it has to be replaced in two years, I dont think you can assume the 470 4gb will not have issues as well, either from vram or sheer lack of processing power. I dont consider it a major issue though, for either card. They are both 200 dollar or cheaper gpus. If one wants to be relatively sure to be able to play demanding games in two or three years without a lot of compromises, especially with new consoles coming out, they will simply have to pony up for a more powerful class card, like the 1070 or higher. And I know the arguments that those who buy these cards cannot afford more expensive cards, so the cheap cards have to last a long time. As nice as that would be, that is simply not how things work. If one cant afford a more expensive card, they will have to make some compromises now, and more compromises as the card ages. But so what, the world is not going to end simply because one has to turn down some settings playing a video game.

Well, history shows us otherwise. Gpus like 6930/6950 1GB, 660/ti or 770 are well known for being short as games started to use more vram, and yet they are very capable of running games launched much later. The 6950 2GB is very capable of running GTA V medium-high or Witcher 3 low-medium at a very decent framerate, while the 770 4GB is still more than fine nowadays. However, 1GB was ok in 2011, not in 2013. 2GB was ok in 2013, not now. 3GB is ok now, but it won't be in 2-3 years, and specially with dx12/vulkan that tend to use a lot more vram.

 

[antihelten]

Yes, I'm playing at medium settings with textures at low.

I don't know if it's the game or a memory allocation issue. All I know is FH3 can allocate +2GB of vram in my system memory while not experiencing heavy stutter, I suppose this is due to how the game is designed as the xbox one has normal ddr3 for the vram.
There's not a path for the corruptions. Sometimes it happens within seconds, sometimes I can play for half an hour. Sometimes it's only with few things (like car copkit, rearviews or some tiny grass), sometimes it's the entire road or all IA cars. Having the vram split between gpu and system memory could potentially end up with memory issues, like allocation misses or conflicts.

I'm surprised that playing on medium with low textures would need more than 2GB, but there you go.

The amount of memory allocated in system memory doesn't mean all that much, and frankly 2GB is quite low in this regard. Obviously the more VRAM limited you are the more system memory you will tend to use, but GameGPU showed that it can use much much more than 2GB:

Regarding the crashing and texture corruption and the somewhat chaotic nature of it, I just noticed that Nvidia's drivers apparently suffer from a memory leak in Forza Horizon 3, who knows if this is also the case for AMD and thus your 285 card. Coincidentally that also puts this entire thread in a new light.