Why more Vram is always better

[mohit9206]

I always hear people say no games today take advantage of higher vram so go for this lower vram model. But do most people buy video cards just for today's games? They buy a video card so it could also run games coming out 2-3 years later just as much as current games.
I will give a brief history of my video card purchases over the years and how getting model with more vram has always benefited me.
My first video card was Geforce Ti4200 128mb.Most said you don't need the extra 64mb but guess what later games like Doom3, HL2, Far Cry1 etc ran better with 128mb vram.
My Next video card was Geforce 6800GS 512mb instead of the 256mb model. This really helped me in future games where some games required minimum 512mb vram to run. Games like Crysis, Dead Space, Bioshock etc all benefited from this extra vram.
Then my next card was 6950 2gb which was clearly better buy than the 1gb model which I am still using.
And my next card will be a 4GB card which many of you feel is overkill but again its going to last me longer than the 2gb and 3gb models.
So its better to get the extra vram because the extra price is offset by more longevity and better performance in future games. Unless you have evidence contradicting this theory please enlighten me.
Its not hard to imagine AAA games in 2020 will run better on an 8gb video card than in 4gb or 6gb models.
That's why i feel its better to buy a video card with the extra vram because of more futureproofing. You can ask the owners of gtx 680/770 2gb how they feel about this matter and they would tell you they should have gone for the 4gb model instead.
This only applies to mid range and high end cards as cards like R7 240 2gb or GT 740 4gb are not going to show any performance difference now or even 5 years in the future.

 

[96Firebird]

And my next card will be a 4GB card which many of you feel is overkill but again its going to last me longer than the 2gb and 3gb models.

You may not frequent this section of the forums, but I think the majority of people here do not think 4GB VRAM is overkill. Hell, some people are saying top models now should have 6-8GB...

I, for one, don't totally agree that extra VRAM is always necessary. I had a 2GB 770 that was working just fine when I sold it, it wasn't able to max everything but I knew to turn down settings if I had to. Usually, the GPU couldn't keep up with settings that pushed the 2GB VRAM buffer anyways. It just didn't have enough power behind it. That was at 1680x1050 though. If I were to run SLI, however, the power behind the GPUs could have handled >2GB settings. That is where 4GB cards would have helped.

Also, some say the 12GB on the Titan X is overkill, because the extra power that is being used up by the unused VRAM could be used to supply more power to the GPU (I used the word "used" too many times).

Just some food for thought.

 

[mohit9206]

You may not frequent this section of the forums, but I think the majority of people here do not think 4GB VRAM is overkill. Hell, some people are saying top models now should have 6-8GB...

I, for one, don't totally agree that extra VRAM is always necessary. I had a 2GB 770 that was working just fine when I sold it, it wasn't able to max everything but I knew to turn down settings if I had to. Usually, the GPU couldn't keep up with settings that pushed the 2GB VRAM buffer anyways. It just didn't have enough power behind it. That was at 1680x1050 though. If I were to run SLI, however, the power behind the GPUs could have handled >2GB settings. That is where 4GB cards would have helped.

Also, some say the 12GB on the Titan X is overkill, because the extra power that is being used up by the unused VRAM could be used to supply more power to the GPU (I used the word "used" too many times).

Just some food for thought.

Yeah i think 4gb will also be problematic soon enough seeing as how games are using full 4gb even today. So yes maybe 6gb is indeed the sweet spot this year and more futureproof than 4gb card.
However i disagree with you that gtx770 is not powerful enough to use more than 2gb vram because seeing as how 770=7950 and 7950 can use full 3gb so can too the 770.You are just defending your decision to buy the 2gb card. You did have to turn down the settings so clearly you were memory bottlenecked.
However i agree with you that Titan X having 12gb vram is completely overkill especially considering its price. If Titan X was $600 then it would have been a good buy as a thoroughly futureproof card as games will definitely use more than 6gb vram in 2-3 years but at $1k its very bad value.

 

[Pinstripe]

I think VRAM usage could be greatly contained once TiledResources will be finally used in games. But that would require Win10/DX12 exclusivity, which I believe we won't see until 2017/18 at the earliest.

 

[casiofx]

Getting big VRAM is overkill last time when we're still running cross-platform games with PS3/Xbox360.

Now there many big textured games coming in from cross-platform with PS4/Xbox1, we need more VRAMs.

I think Titan X's 12GB VRAM amount is good. 6GB would be too little for it since some people would do multiple card SLIs

 

[Lonyo]

In the old(er) days, there was a problem with absurd amounts of RAM on the wrong card. We are talking FX5200's with 1GB RAM.

The other problem was the RAM used. You would sometimes get, for example, a 512MB GDDR5 card on one hand, or the same GPU but with 1GB of DDR3 on the other hand. The GDDR5 version was much faster, because it had significantly faster RAM, and at the time the 512MB vs 1GB didn't matter.

Nowadays, most people don't say you should go for the lower RAM amount (here at least), although people will advise based on your system.
Someone running a 4k or even 1440p/21:9 monitor will definitely want the extra RAM. Someone on a tight budget running 1080p or sub 1080p might benefit more from the money being spent elsewhere.

Most cards nowadays also only come with suitable RAM amounts.
A prime example would be the GTX960.
The 2GB card is available from $191. The 4GB card is $230.
If you are buying that card, you probably don't have a super high end system with expensive monitor.
It might be worth spending that $40 to upgrade from a Core i3 to a Core i5, or making sure you get 8GB system RAM instead of 4GB, for example, depending on budget.

While it's more ideal to go for more RAM, the decision can sometimes be based on how much money you have to spend, and what your system is. Nowadays the RAM is typically suitable for the card and there are no other spec differences, but that means it's purely down to cost, and when you have a budget, spending the money elsewhere might bring bigger gains.

 

[Gryz]

Completely disagree.

You would be right, if the extra memory would not cost any extra money. But it does.

I have a gtx680 in my system. Bought it the day it was released. The first 28nm GPU by nVidia. I was planning to keep it until the first 16nm (or 20nm) GPUs would be available.

I paid 500 euros for it. It seems that during its lifetime, the cost stayed at 500 euros average. (Numbers are taken from a dutch website that keeps track of prices of most of our webshops). The 4GB version of the gtx680 cost about 580 euros average.

The 2GB was good enough for me. And still is good enough. I play at 1920x1080. I've not encountered a game yet where my fps tanked because of lack of vram. None. Those extra 80 euros would have been a complete waste of money. I also only have 8GB of RAM in my system. I've only once encountered a situation where that wasn't enough. If I had put 16GB of RAM in my system, that would be another waste of 50 euros. Enlarging the pagefile (=0 atm) would be good enough to deal with those few exceptions.

I recently tried my first 1440p monitor. Now things change. Now I encountered a few games where my fps did tank, because of lack of VRAM. Simply changing from 4xMSAA to SMAA fixed it, btw. But for my new 1400p monitor, I agree that I need more horsepower. But guess what ? I don't need just more VRAM. I also need more compute power. So I need to buy a new videocard anyway. My current one is 3 years old. So for any gamer, that's time to upgrade anyway.

You should look at it this way.
Any amount of money you do not spend today, you can use in the (near) future for earlier upgrades. Having upgrades every 30 months in stead of 36 months do increase the average performance of your dollars over the years. Just like the difference in cost between the best-performance item, and the next in line, is often better spend in upgrading more often, in stead of buying the most expensive parts you can find. Be smart. That's more effective than just throwing money blindly at any problem.

 

[Hdgamer]

I gave up on this whole vram debate. I buy the lower vram cards and have never had an issue. Issues I've had was turning down game settings because my card was to slow at maximum settings to run. But then again I don't need MSAA 8X or even 4X to enjoy a game. To me that's overkill in many situations as I do not notice a difference between them and 2X. I'm not that picky on aliasing as I am about maxing out other settings that seem to do more for what my eyes can see.

Also never noticed stuttering because a game ran out of vram in recent games. Backin the day when I would play games like Soldier of Fortune 2 or the first Call of duty or even when Oblivion came out, you could most definatly tell when you ran out of vram. You DID NOT need software or numbers to tell you and your fps tanked to single digits when looking at explosions, or water, etc. Basically games these days utilize vram differently and there's a lot of hype on forums on why you need more but it's just hype.

As for future proofing? Come on!!! If you still want to play games two years from now on your current card maxed out, that means pc gaming has stagnated and become boring. That means you don't need an upgrade and graphics have not progressed which is why I always loved PC gaming over consoles. If you want to turn up the settings two years from now, plan to upgrade.

 

[skipsneeky2]

Only two titles i have played recently that really made me wish i had a 4gb 770 have been Titanfall and GTA5.All other games either ran incredibly well or performance hasn't been good enough to enable settings that use near or over 2gb.

Typically i buy cards,lower settings till i get the desired 60+ minimums i usually like when possible so perhaps this 970 could hold up to the likes of the 290/290x in future titles but for others this thing is already doa.

 

[MongGrel]

You may not frequent this section of the forums, but I think the majority of people here do not think 4GB VRAM is overkill. Hell, some people are saying top models now should have 6-8GB...

:thumbsup::thumbsup:

 

[snorge]

Only two titles i have played recently that really made me wish i had a 4gb 770 have been Titanfall and GTA5.All other games either ran incredibly well or performance hasn't been good enough to enable settings that use near or over 2gb.

Typically i buy cards,lower settings till i get the desired 60+ minimums i usually like when possible so perhaps this 970 could hold up to the likes of the 290/290x in future titles but for others this thing is already doa.

The people saying it is doa are idiots.

 

[hawtdawg]

With the amount of vram some of these (unoptimized) console ports are using, I'd be afraid to buy a new card with less than 6 gigs of vram, especially if you game at 1440p+. I've already seen limitations with 780's (can't use ultra textures in Shadow of Mordor without hitching@1440p).

I'd very much like to give AMD another shot, but my fear is that the 390X is going to have 4 gigs initially, and we wont see an 8 gig version till late in the year. 980ti with 6 gigs seems like a good sweet spot/

 

[Flapdrol1337]

You may not frequent this section of the forums, but I think the majority of people here do not think 4GB VRAM is overkill.

Yeah, when I read the title I thought it was going to be about how a titan x should have 24GB or something.

 

[xthetenth]

By the time you're going from 8 to 12 GB on the Titan X, I start wondering if the compute's going to be dragging before 12 GB is needed, and whether the overall part would keep good performance longer if they'd gone with 8 GB and a larger power budget for the GPU.

Short of that on a high performance card it's pretty much always going to be good for performance, the question is the cost.

 

[Red Hawk]

Well, more VRAM is never going to be worse than less VRAM with all other factors the same. But VRAM is just one factor in a graphics card's performance; more VRAM is not necessarily always tangibly better. If you don't have the memory bandwidth to make use of all that memory, it won't do you any good. A 128 bit bus is just not going to make use of 4 GB of RAM (2 GB is already pushing it with 128 bit buses, really). And you won't see a benefit in games that are more compute or shader bottlenecked than memory bottlenecked. Buying a hypothetical 4 GB Geforce 960 (and I have no idea if such a thing exists) is just not worth it for the memory.

Bottom line, you need to have a graphics card capable of using the memory before you have high amounts of memory.

 

[SirPauly]

With multi-gpu platforms it may make some sense to invest into sku's that offer more ram because the added performance translates into higher resolution and fidelity settings that may be out-of-reach for a single gpu at times.

 

[Cloudfire777]

Indirectly the move to x86 for today`s new consoles is a cause of higher GPU price.
Mixed with lazy and profit driven game developers.

Dangerous mix

 

[Maveee]

Damnit this topic makes me doubt between the 970 and 980 again.. (was about to buy the 970)

 

[Flapdrol1337]

Damnit this topic makes me doubt between the 970 and 980 again.. (was about to buy the 970)

Meh, the 980 is only 15% more vram. I'd just get the 970.

 

[Shehriazad]

Well it's nice to have "room"...sure...but for example if you plan on sticking to 1080P and you are a gamer...then being above 4GB just seems stupid.

On the other hand 4K...there 4GB seems to be "just enough"...so having more is always good...but in the end at least to me it still doesn't matter as there is no single GPU on the market yet that can keep the framerate of the newest titles at a stable 60+ frames, anyway...unless you turn down your settings, which is not what I want to do when playing on new tech. (Not a fan of multi gpu).



Once that happens...I will have to worry about what kind of Vram amount I want to go with...but so far I have to say, for the stuff I play 2GB seems to be "just enough".
Sure, if you go crazy and put games onto a 200% resolution scale you will easily push past 2GB...but essentially that's 4K requirements without getting 4K quality.

In my case I prefer getting Monitors with high pixel density...so I don't even need all those crazy AA and Scaling settings just to get rid of pixelation.


Here some examples from my personal experience

@ 2560x1080P
My Elder Scrolls Online 4xMSAA tops out at 1843MB (my highest ever)
Nosgoth Ultra + 4xMSAA = 1213MB
League of Legends @5K res scaled = 1150ish MB
Warframe @150% res scaling with MSAA (ingame version = 1650MB tops.

Those are the games I play..and quite frankly I don't even have a reason to go past 2GB for now. The Witcher might change that...but the Witcher needs an insane GPU to run 60FPS @ Ultra in 1080P, anyway.

But in the end it's all up to the consumer...if you think you want to pay 50$ more for an additional 2GB of Vram or something for "futureproofing"...then sure, go ahead...For now I'll remain as a part of the faction of "buy just enough"...especially since I experiment around a lot, anyway and build PCs like 2-3 times a year.
HBM might change my behaviour on this as well as it only seems to come in stacks of 4GB(at least for products that are currently being prepared)..and HBM powered GPUs are going to be my jump to 4K gaming...in which case I might START with 8GB for the sake of it.

 

[soccerballtux]

I think you need 8GB to be ahead of the curve now

 

[imaheadcase]

I don't see it a big deal, 6 months ago i was using a GTX 580 1.5gigs of ram and every game ran fine with it.

You are better off worry about other system components than video ram. The whole 970 video card ram stuff was silly to complain about.

 

[Red Hawk]

Indirectly the move to x86 for today`s new consoles is a cause of higher GPU price.
Mixed with lazy and profit driven game developers.

Dangerous mix

Er, what? Thanks to the APU solution provided by AMD, graphics chips in the eighth generation consoles are pretty cost effective. Especially compared to seventh generation consoles on launch.

 

[poofyhairguy]

With the amount of vram some of these (unoptimized) console ports are using,

That is what scares me, the consoles with their 8GB of unified RAM. Something tells me that towards the end of the console's life we might see over 4GB of VRAM used at 1080p easily, as that would only be half the VRAM each console has.

 

[Aikouka]

Hm... I'm not sure if I can agree completely. It's kind of like driving a V10 car around in normal city traffic. In most cars, you're still powering all 10 cylinders (unless the car has the ability to shutdown cylinders, which some have), which aren't really necessary. So, how does this relate to GPUs? If you're using a nVidia card and are trying to overclock, that memory is still powered regardless of whether you're using it. The video cards are also limited to a certain power threshold, which means that memory eats into your available power and potentially limits your OC.