# Is 3GB Vram enough at 1440p



## the54thvoid (Mar 13, 2014)

I know people have their opinions but i was wondering if we have any facts about the effect of Vram at higher resolutions and quality settings where more than 3GB would optimally be used.

I ask because if 3GB was not enough, why does the 7990 still maintain top spot in graphics performance tables, even at high resolutions?  I've seen Thief on all settings maxed take my Titan up to 3.5-3.9Gb.  I've seen Titanfall use the same and CoD Ghosts has a knack for 6Gb on my card.

But my thought is that if the GPU is fast enough (think mighty overclock on a 780Ti) then perhaps the smaller framebuffer is less relevant as the gpu throughput is so fast any requirement over 3GB is 'processed' at a much higher rate.

Or is it more a case that in higher Vram requirements there may be more stuttering if the card keeps loading textures?

I'm wondering because I'd contemplated on playing with a 780Ti Classified (for the sake of having a card you can actually fanny about with without fear) but seeing more games using more Vram on my Titan makes me think twice.....

I'm not making a poll out of this as I'm looking for evidence not 'popular' theory


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## FX-GMC (Mar 13, 2014)

I'd say yes.  There may be a slight increase (one or two fps) with more vram.

http://alienbabeltech.com/main/gtx-770-4gb-vs-2gb-tested/3/
http://www.legitreviews.com/gigabyte-geforce-gtx-760-4gb-video-card-review-2gb-4gb_129062/4


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## Kaynar (Mar 13, 2014)

The thing with 1440p 27" is that you don't need more than 2x AA in games. I find it impossible to spot a difference between 2x 4x and 8x MSAA in any game I have tried. Therefore I think 3GB ram is perfectly enough at 1440p because you can reduce the most ram-hungry setting without losing a single bit of visual quality.


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## MxPhenom 216 (Mar 13, 2014)

Yes, as you don't need as much AA. @erocker has been stressing that his single 7970 runs every game he plays (BF4, etc. ) with no issues at 1440p on ultra.

Thought, if you play Skyrim with 2k and 4k texture mods, might have some problems, but there is a mod that will compress the textures without loosing any noticeable quality, also helps in reducing stuttering.


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## erocker (Mar 13, 2014)

Kaynar said:


> The thing with 1440p 27" is that you don't need more than 2x AA in games. I find it impossible to spot a difference between 2x 4x and 8x MSAA in any game I have tried. Therefore I think 3GB ram is perfectly enough at 1440p because you can reduce the most ram-hungry setting without losing a single bit of visual quality.


This is true!  With everything on Ultra and x2 AA I generally keep above 75 fps. My card is clocked at 1300/1675 on water though.


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## Hilux SSRG (Mar 13, 2014)

Would 2GB Vram enough at 1440p tho?  Even if you run no AA?


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## the54thvoid (Mar 13, 2014)

MxPhenom 216 said:


> Yes, as you don't need as much AA. @erocker has been stressing that his single 7970 runs every game he plays (BF4, etc. ) with no issues at 1440p on ultra.
> 
> Thought, if you play Skyrim with 2k and 4k texture mods, might have some problems, but there is a mod that will compress the textures without loosing any noticeable quality, also helps in reducing stuttering.





erocker said:


> This is true!  With everything on Ultra and x2 AA I generally keep above 75 fps. My card is clocked at 1300/1675 on water though.



My thought is that even in games that 'require' more than 3GB of Vram, the overclock on a water cooled 780Ti classified (with voltage increase via evga software tool) will still increase significantly on the performance i am getting now on my Titan at 1.1GHz.  Cost isn't the issue and the more i look, the more it seems the memory usage is not relevant when the gpu speed is there.


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## FX-GMC (Mar 13, 2014)

Hilux SSRG said:


> Would 2GB Vram enough at 1440p tho?  Even if you run no AA?



Yes.  The links I posted above show that 2gb is fine at 1600p as well.


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## Vario (Mar 13, 2014)

With more Vram, does the system simply just utilize more of the capacity with little benefit?


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## FreedomEclipse (Mar 13, 2014)

FX-GMC said:


> I'd say yes.  There may be a slight increase (one or two fps) with more vram.
> 
> http://alienbabeltech.com/main/gtx-770-4gb-vs-2gb-tested/3/
> http://www.legitreviews.com/gigabyte-geforce-gtx-760-4gb-video-card-review-2gb-4gb_129062/4



Good read.

I was worried about needing to upgrade my graphic cards but I guess i dont need to worry when i get that 27" monitor!


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## FX-GMC (Mar 13, 2014)

Vario said:


> With more Vram, does the system simply just utilize more of the capacity with little benefit?



I'm sure it depends on the game and how much of the buffer is gonna have to be constantly swapped on the lower vram card.  It may just be that with enough memory bandwidth the bottleneck lies with actually outputting the graphics (the processing of the frames, generating the graphics....I wish I could've said my thoughts more elegantly.)


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## Fluffmeister (Mar 13, 2014)

I'm on a GTX 670 2GB @ 1440P, zero issues.

As always underlying GPU grunt will become issue before VRAM limitations really kick in.


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## Hilux SSRG (Mar 13, 2014)

Fluffmeister said:


> I'm on a GTX 670 2GB @ 1440P, zero issues.
> 
> As always underlying GPU grunt will become issue before VRAM limitations really kick in.


 
I'm also a 670 owner with a really good oc.  Good to know it can handle 1440P.  My next upgrade is one of those Korean 1440P monitors for sale on ebay.


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## bpgt64 (Mar 13, 2014)

Yes, as someone who has been running a Titan for 4k resolution, I haven't seen any game that uses more than 3GB, most don't use more than 2GB.  Games just aren't designed to use that kind of memory yet.  I just got the 4k panel, and the 1440p rarely used more than 2GB


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## FX-GMC (Mar 13, 2014)

Hilux SSRG said:


> I'm also a 670 owner with a really good oc.  Good to know it can handle 1440P.  My next upgrade is one of those Korean 1440P monitors for sale on ebay.



I just looked on ebay and those 1440p monitors aren't as cheap as they used to be


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## FreedomEclipse (Mar 13, 2014)

FX-GMC said:


> I just looked on ebay and those 1440p monitors aren't as cheap as they used to be



Look for the Korean monitors, they are pretty decent and theres a thread on this forum dedicated to them somewhere.


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## Fluffmeister (Mar 13, 2014)

Hilux SSRG said:


> I'm also a 670 owner with a really good oc.  Good to know it can handle 1440P.  My next upgrade is one of those Korean 1440P monitors for sale on ebay.



Yeah I'm using a Crossover 27Q, really happy with it, got it from AccessoriesWhole.


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## Flibolito (Mar 13, 2014)

I am very happy with my 680 2GB at 1440p. As stated before less AA makes up for it and games look better. AA is like fake resolution anyway and doesn't look as good as straight up more res at the same size/viewing distance. I would say 3Gb would be better as I do use like 1950MB in BF4. One other thing to consider is that more Vram can mean lower FPS by a very small mount as seen in benchmarks. New game engines will control texture quality in far distances (to keep from buffer overflow) where you hardly notice and therefore go a tiny bit easier on the GPU. In BF3 mainly going from 1.5GB to 2GB make crazy far stuff look better.


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## BiggieShady (Mar 13, 2014)

Some games are known to load as much texture resources as possible and eat all your VRAM, although game doesn't need all of it for current part of game world. That way it seems that game is starving for VRAM but essentially it's only preloading for later. Stalker series comes to mind IIRC.


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## the54thvoid (Mar 13, 2014)

BiggieShady said:


> Some games are known to load as much texture resources as possible and eat all your VRAM, although game doesn't need all of it for current part of game world. That way it seems that game is starving for VRAM but essentially it's only preloading for later. Stalker series comes to mind IIRC.



Yeah, i think Titan Fall was doing that as well as CoD Ghosts


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## RCoon (Mar 13, 2014)

MxPhenom 216 said:


> Thought, if you play Skyrim with 2k and 4k texture mods, might have some problems



I haven't had any as of yet, however I get the impression that if games could make use of more than 3GB, they have a tendency to do so. I don't remember where I saw it, but I remember seeing somebody play a game fine with a 3GB VRAM GPU, and the VRAM usage was around 93%. Then when they tested the same game on 4/6GB, the VRAM usage went above the 3GB even though the situation was identical in terms of setup and video settings.


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## MxPhenom 216 (Mar 13, 2014)

RCoon said:


> I haven't had any as of yet, however I get the impression that if games could make use of more than 3GB, they have a tendency to do so. I don't remember where I saw it, but I remember seeing somebody play a game fine with a 3GB VRAM GPU, and the VRAM usage was around 93%. Then when they tested the same game on 4/6GB, the VRAM usage went above the 3GB even though the situation was identical in terms of setup and video settings.



It depends on the game engine used IIRC. For instance, you take a GTX780 with 3GB of ram, play Battlefield 4 on ultra uses close to all 3GB, play BF4 with EXACT same settings with a 290/290x and it'll use more than 3GB.


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## the54thvoid (Mar 13, 2014)

MxPhenom 216 said:


> It depends on the game engine used IIRC. For instance, you take a GTX780 with 3GB of ram, play Battlefield 4 on ultra uses close to all 3GB, play BF4 with EXACT same settings with a 290/290x and it'll use more than 3GB.



And what I want to know is does it _play faster_ using the extra memory or is it just using it because it can?  From what's been said so far, I don't think the extra memory is relevant.  If a coder could come in and say, "well, you know, we code to present 'x' amount of information to the system and we only ever need to operate on 'y' memory buffer" then we could all stop being led on a merry dance about 3GB, 4GB  or 6GB.  

And I could go buy me a 780Ti Classified.  Though knowing my luck it'd be a shit clocker.


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## Outback Bronze (Mar 13, 2014)

I've got a mate who runs 2xgtx titans and 4 monitors and it chews 5.5GB.

If he was running a single monitor he wouldn't come close.

Id say at 1440p 3GB is ample.

Different games chew different amounts of vram e.g. I run an old P4 system for fun and play the original need for speed at 2560x1600 and it gets 40+ frames. This card is a 3850 agp with only 512 vram!

Newer games have a lot more textures so (crisis 3 e.t.c) at hi res and AA would probably use all 3gb. This is not to say it runs shabby with a 7990 like you say. 

Yes im starting to think that on single monitors that vram can have little difference from 1-6GB. I've seen 1GB models out do 2GB at 1080p.

So yeah, lots of vram seems to be for multiple monitors and probably 4k.
.


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## Slizzo (Mar 17, 2014)

the54thvoid said:


> I know people have their opinions but i was wondering if we have any facts about the effect of Vram at higher resolutions and quality settings where more than 3GB would optimally be used.
> 
> I ask because if 3GB was not enough, why does the 7990 still maintain top spot in graphics performance tables, even at high resolutions?  I've seen Thief on all settings maxed take my Titan up to 3.5-3.9Gb.  I've seen Titanfall use the same and CoD Ghosts has a knack for 6Gb on my card.
> 
> ...




My issue isn't the amount of vram available, that's fine. It's that a single GTX780 isn't enough to drive my games full out at this resolution, I need a second to make framerates playable maxed out.


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## erocker (Mar 17, 2014)

the54thvoid said:


> But my thought is that if the GPU is fast enough (think mighty overclock on a 780Ti) then perhaps the smaller framebuffer is less relevant as the gpu throughput is so fast any requirement over 3GB is 'processed' at a much higher rate.



Even though I already replied to this thread (3gb is enough) this statement is very true. This is why I get such a drastic difference in performance when overclocking my 7970 from 925 Mhz to 1250 Mhz. It just eats through the data that much faster.

@Slizzo, a GTX 780 should be enough. Any particular games you're having issues with?


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