2GB VRAM not enough for BF4?

[toyota]

Yeah, this is why more VRAM use is a good thing - higher resolution textures don't cause a large hit in performance, generally speaking. The other thing which can potentially use a ton of VRAM is MSAA and especially SSAA. Both of those have huge VRAM hits as well.

Basically, higher resolution textures up to 16k would be a fantastic use of VRAM with a negligible performance hit. I do feel like devs will cater to lowest common denominator hardware, though, so it may be a while before this comes to fruition. I do hope i'm wrong.

high res texture cause basically no performance hit at all with adequate vram. I tested Crysis 3 on low through very high textures and only 1 fps difference total on very high compared to low. thats why it pisses me off how lazy game makers are about not making some hi res texture options on the pc.

 

[5150Joker]

I'd have to agree with this in one respect - there is no evidence that this is a caching issue. Honestly, and no offense BC, but it sounds like confirmation bias - this "caching" is contrary to what devs have stated and it is completely speculative. I haven't seen any such proof of this, and from what I see in afterburner it doesn't seem to be caching at all. What we do know is that MP BF4 uses way more VRAM than single player, and there are benchmarks showing high VRAM usage at 1600p in BF4, beyond 2GB. VRAM use in single player does not match MP - and who the heck plays battlefield for single player? The large majority of BF players are there for the competitive MP aspect.

That said I do think 2GB is more than fine for 1080p, but there's no way in hell i'd buy a 2GB as a new purchaser for a resolution such as 1440/1600p. Now I don't know if I'd go as far as to recommend 6GB for higher than 1080p, but certainly I'd want a minimum of 3GB of VRAM or a 770 with 4GB instead of 2GB.

Good point, I've been testing this in MP since it is an MP game with SP tossed in for whatever reason. Could be that SP operates differently.

high res texture cause basically no performance hit at all with adequate vram. I tested Crysis 3 on low through very high textures and only 1 fps difference total on very high compared to low. thats why it pisses me off how lazy game makers are about not making some hi res texture options on the pc.

Yeah it's pretty ridiculous how lazy they've been with respects to the PC and their excuses don't fly either. Digital download sales are great for them so piracy isn't as big of an issue as it used to be just a few years back. I don't think it would take too much resources to create higher res packs for many PC games.

 

[horza]

..

 

[poohbear]

I'd have to agree with this in one respect - there is no evidence that this is a caching issue. Honestly, and no offense BC, but it sounds like confirmation bias - this "caching" is contrary to what devs have stated and it is completely speculative. I haven't seen any such proof of this, and from what I see in afterburner it doesn't seem to be caching at all. What we do know is that MP BF4 uses way more VRAM than single player, and there are benchmarks showing high VRAM usage at 1600p in BF4, beyond 2GB. VRAM use in single player does not match MP - and who the heck plays battlefield for single player? The large majority of BF players are there for the competitive MP aspect.

That said I do think 2GB is more than fine for 1080p, but there's no way in hell i'd buy a 2GB as a new purchaser for a resolution such as 1440/1600p. Now I don't know if I'd go as far as to recommend 6GB for higher than 1080p, but I can recognize 6GB as being useful for someone who wants to push the limits with image quality via SGSSAA. Or if they're playing at 4k resolutions. Regardless, I'd want a minimum of 3GB of VRAM on a 780 or a 770 with 4GB instead of 2GB. Again, no way I would ever get a 2GB card as a new purchaser - I would want a minimum of 1 year of use out of a GPU and that one year becomes questionable with only 2GB one year from now, especially higher than 1080p.

I just posted, and others as well, that we game @ 60 fps @ 2gb @ 1440p in SLI @ Ultra (60fps avg). I dont use AA @ 1440p because i was actually around when AA was first introduced in gaming (yes im old). it was marketed specifically as a technique for getting rid of the jaggies that are horrendous for lower resolutions (800×600 & 1024x768 ). @ 1440p those jaggies are hardly noticeable. i hardly noticed a diff with AA on & AA off. But im not ultra anal, others will say they can notice it, but to each their own.

Anyways if ure a new purchaser and getting a high end card, then yes for the future 3~4gb is certainly the way to go. Right now there are only 1~2 games that would use more than 2gb @ 1440p. Skyrim with mods (without mods it wont even use 1gb vram), & bf4 with 4x AA.

 

[blackened23]

You mention it's subjective, but IMO 1440p doesn't eliminate the need for AA; I play at 1440p/1600p as well depending on which screen i'm on. The jaggies don't magically disappear at high resolution - the post process in BF4 is horrendous so unless you're playing from 10 feet away, you will notice jaggies. At a minimum, I use FXAA with everything at 1600p because frankly, it is needed. I'm sure viewing distance modifies this equation but most players sit close to their PC screens, close enough that jaggies become apparent. Furthermore, AA uses VRAM so there's your answer, although you seem to imply that you know this.

I mean, you can make 2GB work if you have such a card at 1600p. I would hate to be in that position a year from now, though, like you said buying a new GPU with only 2GB is pretty ridiculous for anyone playing higher than 1080p. It's pretty much like those 5870 users with 1GB or GTX 570 users with 1.25GB now. Not a good spot to be in. The 570 came out in what, 2011? It's not that old. And it's clear that 1.25GB is worthless even at 1080p. Why would anyone intentionally buy a 2GB card just to end up like that a year from now.....

 

[5150Joker]

The way I understand it (and I have no idea if the engine behaves this way or not) is that the engine caches all the assets it can if there is video memory available.

Lets say hypothetically it caches 2400 megabytes with a 770 4GB at a particular resolution. Now you change to a 770 2GB so the video memory is full. The question is does that 400mb of data that's now not cached have an effect on performance or can the card cope (by prioritizing and swapping stuff in and out) and still maintain the same performance? Is the game caching conservatively when it strictly doesn't need to?

I'm not making any claims here but the fact that Afterburner shows x VRAM use doesn't necessarily mean it's "needs" that much RAM. This scenario is consistent with what you are seeing as different maps would have differing assets. "caching over time" would never mean caching assets it didn't need and thus filling up all 6GB say in your case.

I understand that but in that case it wouldn't ever cache more than 2GB according to BH's assertion which isn't true. While on the subejct of "assets", what exactly are we talking about here? Fixed textures and shaders? I haven't seen it clearly defined and I think it should be so that we can all be on the same page and test accordingly.

 

[poohbear]

You mention it's subjective, but IMO 1440p doesn't eliminate the need for AA; I play at 1440p/1600p as well depending on which screen i'm on. The jaggies don't magically disappear at high resolution - the post process in BF4 is horrendous so unless you're playing from 10 feet away, you will notice jaggies. At a minimum, I use FXAA with everything at 1600p because frankly, it is needed. I'm sure viewing distance modifies this equation but most players sit close to their PC screens, close enough that jaggies become apparent. Furthermore, AA uses VRAM so there's your answer, although you seem to imply that you know this.

I mean, you can make 2GB work if you have such a card at 1600p. I would hate to be in that position a year from now, though, like you said buying a new GPU with only 2GB is pretty ridiculous for anyone playing higher than 1080p. It's pretty much like those 5870 users with 1GB or GTX 570 users with 1.25GB now. Not a good spot to be in. The 570 came out in what, 2011? It's not that old. And it's clear that 1.25GB is worthless even at 1080p. Why would anyone intentionally buy a 2GB card just to end up like that a year from now.....

Yes I "seem to imply to understand". Ofcourse AA uses vram, i assumed everyone on a videocard forum knows that just like i assumed everyone here knows what AA is. That was the whole purpose of explaining that i dont use AA.

 

[moonbogg]

Here's my plan. Since my entire rig revolves around BF games, I make sure it plays it flawlessly. I am getting good performance in windows 8.1, however, sometimes when there is an explosion, or sometimes at random, there is a brief pause or freeze. When zooming in with the scope, it slows down then speeds up rapidly back to normal. These are the exact symptoms I had with gtx 570's in BF3.
I will disable core parking and try to see if these issues are caused by cpu spikes, which should be corrected by game patches or drivers or whatever. Maybe disabling core parking will fix it. If it doesn't, I am buying two R9 290's. Yep, i'm switching right over to the red team after well over a decade of loyal Nvidia product use. I've absolutely had it with this Vram gimping of otherwise capable GPUs. It happened at 1080p 2 years ago, and I bet its happening again now, yes, at 1080p. My Vram is pegged at over 1900MB. That tells me I am OUT of Vram for this game and anomalies, as slight as they may be, can be expected. That will get real annoying trying to deal with these little issues for the next two years.

 

[Childs]

Here's my plan. Since my entire rig revolves around BF games, I make sure it plays it flawlessly. I am getting good performance in windows 8.1, however, sometimes when there is an explosion, or sometimes at random, there is a brief pause or freeze. When zooming in with the scope, it slows down then speeds up rapidly back to normal. These are the exact symptoms I had with gtx 570's in BF3.
I will disable core parking and try to see if these issues are caused by cpu spikes, which should be corrected by game patches or drivers or whatever. Maybe disabling core parking will fix it. If it doesn't, I am buying two R9 290's. Yep, i'm switching right over to the red team after well over a decade of loyal Nvidia product use. I've absolutely had it with this Vram gimping of otherwise capable GPUs. It happened at 1080p 2 years ago, and I bet its happening again now, yes, at 1080p. My Vram is pegged at over 1900MB. That tells me I am OUT of Vram for this game and anomalies, as slight as they may be, can be expected. That will get real annoying trying to deal with these little issues for the next two years.

Maybe you should give it a couple of weeks. The 780ti is around the corner, and with the price of the 290 being lower than expected, there might be additional price reductions on either the 780 or 770 4GB. I just bought a second 680 2GB as a bandaid until the dust settles, although I admit if a 290 was available this morning at MSRP I probably would have bought at least one.

 

[nrok45]

I've been contemplating selling my 670's and going for a single GTX 780 Ti. Though I'm worried if I do losing out on that extra 1gb of vram playing at 1440p on my 670's if it would be worth it going over to the 780 Ti's 3gb.

 

[finbarqs]

since BF4 has no build in benchmark (Performance test seems deceiving though) I'm averaging 50-60 @ 1050p on Ultra settings.

4770k @ 4.2
GTX 780 @ +105MHz Core and +105MHz Memory
16GB RAM (2x8GB Corsair Dominators 1600)
Sound Blaster Z


for your reference... (using built in Show FPS)

 

[poohbear]

It was never specified in the OP, but is he buying new or ulgrading from one 770? If buying new then ofcourse its a no brainer, get a 4gb if u wanna max all settings out and are gaming above 1080. If ure upgrading to SLI, 2 things:

1) what resolution? If 1080p 2gb will be fine. If higher rez just be sure ro turn off AA cause that eats up alot of VRAM & doesnt make a diff @1440p+

2)u will have to turn off AA in future titles as VRAM might be an issue. If u can live with that then go ahead & get that 2nd card

 

[Pandora's Box]

yeah if you push it to 1440P max settings and start cranking the resolution scale setting you'll soon hit 3GB of ram. at 2xMSAA ultra settings, no post-aa, 125% resolution scale I hit around 2.6GB

 

[Brahmzy]

FWIW last night while playing BF4 MP on Ultra, no AA (1600p) I was pegged at my 2GB limit on my 670FTWs.

I think my wife would chop balls, but I'm thinking of 2 780tis. I can live without balls, I think.

 

[SimianR]

Here's my plan. Since my entire rig revolves around BF games, I make sure it plays it flawlessly. I am getting good performance in windows 8.1, however, sometimes when there is an explosion, or sometimes at random, there is a brief pause or freeze. When zooming in with the scope, it slows down then speeds up rapidly back to normal. These are the exact symptoms I had with gtx 570's in BF3.
I will disable core parking and try to see if these issues are caused by cpu spikes, which should be corrected by game patches or drivers or whatever. Maybe disabling core parking will fix it. If it doesn't, I am buying two R9 290's. Yep, i'm switching right over to the red team after well over a decade of loyal Nvidia product use. I've absolutely had it with this Vram gimping of otherwise capable GPUs. It happened at 1080p 2 years ago, and I bet its happening again now, yes, at 1080p. My Vram is pegged at over 1900MB. That tells me I am OUT of Vram for this game and anomalies, as slight as they may be, can be expected. That will get real annoying trying to deal with these little issues for the next two years.

You are experiencing the exact same thing that I was with BF3 on my 1GB Radeon 5870. The card was fast enough - I had steady fps but would watch my VRAM usage climb to around 1GB. Then I would get sudden instances where the game would start "hitching" and stuttering but it wasn't HDD swapping and it wasn't reflected in my fps - it was simply my card running out of memory. I kicked myself for not grabbing a 2GB card. This time around I grabbed a 4gb 760 - that might seem like overkill for a 760, but I figured if I ever decided to go SLI that VRAM would not be a limiting issue for awhile. That has definitely been an annoyance this gen - NVIDIA skimping out on VRAM and when you do opt for the cards with extra memory they cost you a quite a bit compared to the AMD cards.

 

[BrightCandle]

I've been contemplating selling my 670's and going for a single GTX 780 Ti. Though I'm worried if I do losing out on that extra 1gb of vram playing at 1440p on my 670's if it would be worth it going over to the 780 Ti's 3gb.

You will loose overall performance with this plan and not stop the stuttering. My own tests showed that the game only utilises up to about 1.5GB of VRAM and that the rest is cached. The game is designed to use all your VRAM. Try looking at the VRAM immediately after the game loads and then watch what it does over a period of time, it just climbs until it fills the card or it runs out of textures to stream in. The game world is bigger than the card can hold, but that is true of most games today anyway, which is why we have texture streaming to begin with. The stutters you are seeing with explosions are probably because of the post processing cost. Explosions have a lot of particle light effects. Its a fairly simple fix obviously, you need to turn the settings down a little bit, specifically target things that are post process heavy like PPAA or other such stream based effects.

The 780 underperforms a 690 (roughly your performance level) in pretty much everything. So for the same frame rate you will be turning down settings in comparison. FRAPS testing of the game shows that the spikes are present on the 780 and on the 690.

So you would be downgrading your system because a load of people with an agenda on the internet were telling you that your cards didn't have enough VRAM and they did it based on a flawed test on a game that doesn't use all the VRAM at all. If you want to get 2x 780's then at least you would on average be looking at a 25% increase in performance, but going from 2x 670's to a single 780 is daft considering we have literally zero games that show a problem with VRAM today. Skyrim + mods is about the only counter example and we have a few games that are showing poor minimums at 1600p. Once we start talking 4k then there is sometimes a problem, but right now today this change will not fix your problem.

 

[poohbear]

You will loose overall performance with this plan and not stop the stuttering. My own tests showed that the game only utilises up to about 1.5GB of VRAM and that the rest is cached. The game is designed to use all your VRAM. Try looking at the VRAM immediately after the game loads and then watch what it does over a period of time, it just climbs until it fills the card or it runs out of textures to stream in. The game world is bigger than the card can hold, but that is true of most games today anyway, which is why we have texture streaming to begin with. The stutters you are seeing with explosions are probably because of the post processing cost. Explosions have a lot of particle light effects. Its a fairly simple fix obviously, you need to turn the settings down a little bit, specifically target things that are post process heavy like PPAA or other such stream based effects.

The 780 underperforms a 690 (roughly your performance level) in pretty much everything. So for the same frame rate you will be turning down settings in comparison. FRAPS testing of the game shows that the spikes are present on the 780 and on the 690.

So you would be downgrading your system because a load of people with an agenda on the internet were telling you that your cards didn't have enough VRAM and they did it based on a flawed test on a game that doesn't use all the VRAM at all. If you want to get 2x 780's then at least you would on average be looking at a 25% increase in performance, but going from 2x 670's to a single 780 is daft considering we have literally zero games that show a problem with VRAM today. Skyrim + mods is about the only counter example and we have a few games that are showing poor minimums at 1600p. Once we start talking 4k then there is sometimes a problem, but right now today this change will not fix your problem.

This. Caching RAM does NOT mean the game needs all that RAM. The stuttering in BF4 is also from poor netcode & engine optimization. Give it a few weeks (or months even) & it'll be as smooth as BF3. Also, did u install the dxsetup in the bf4 folder? DICE didnt make it an automatic install, and all sorts of people are experiencing stuttering problems.

 

[SlickR12345]

I was just looking recently at the memory consumption, I think tomshardware did a comparison or whoever, and BF4 takes from 1300 minimum vram up to 2300.

So yeah, you are safe with 2GB for now, to be future proof though you may want to invest in 4GB.

But all the way up to 19x14 is doesn't use more than 2GB, at 25xXX it uses a little bit more than 2GB.

BF4 is one of the most demanding games right now though, so I don't expect many games to require more than 2GB, unless you want to play at over 25x resolutions.

 

[wand3r3r]

The way I see it is why would you want less RAM than the game itself "can" use???

Naturally it's different, however for example in windows I would never use a bare minimum which will work, however it caches extra stuff since it doesn't deem the ram to be enough. This is merely a fake example, however if I see something able to use more, I'll be sure to have extra, not less.

I do not believe there is no purpose to using that extra RAM, why do you think they utilize it?

On the other hand if I had 2GB, I wouldn't upgrade unless in higher resolutions. However I'd never buy a 2GB card at this point in time, it's ridiculous unless it's super cheap.

 

[Sweepr]

Next gen ports will exceed 2GB @ 1080p very soon. I wouldnt buy any 2GB card for more than $200 right now.

 

[Brahmzy]

Great post BC.

 

[AMD64Blondie]

So glad I went for the 4GB version over the 2GB card when I bought my Gigabyte GTX770 back in July.

 

[Erenhardt]

So glad I went for the 4GB version over the 2GB card when I bought my Gigabyte GTX770 back in July.

If that is a troll attempt I have say... you are good at this!

 

[Marc999]

I was just looking recently at the memory consumption, I think tomshardware did a comparison or whoever, and BF4 takes from 1300 minimum vram up to 2300.

So yeah, you are safe with 2GB for now, to be future proof though you may want to invest in 4GB.

But all the way up to 19x14 is doesn't use more than 2GB, at 25xXX it uses a little bit more than 2GB.

BF4 is one of the most demanding games right now though, so I don't expect many games to require more than 2GB, unless you want to play at over 25x resolutions.

Ok, this is completely contradictory to the glorious charts I've seen. I think it's a waiting game until someone does a full in-depth test.
Even at 1920 x 1080p, my 2gb Sapphire 7850 OC (OC'd further), is pushing 1960+ Vram. That's at Ultra x2 AA (low setting)
There's no way at Ultra x4 AA (high setting) that 2gb Vram would cut it anymore. In fact, it's at that setting that goes over the 2gb barrier.

Point being, I've seen what it can look like at 4xAA and it's a beauty. I'm tempted to scout around for a 280x

 

[B-Riz]

Who are you quoting with regards to "poor image quality" because it's clearly not what I stated. At 27" with a 1440P, I've found that the best image quality is obtained using SSAA + Ultra settings. FXAA causes everything to become blurry so it's not a good option to use, even Hard|OCP's Brent thinks so. 4X MSAA looks fine but the alpha testing benefits immensely from SSAA for things like foliage and fences for maximum IQ whereas TXAA/FXAA create nasty blurs.

1080P is a dying standard and to build a new system today based on that would be very foolish. So for anyone who wants a system that isn't set to be obsolete the day it's built, a 1440P+ target resolution should be kept in mind. With today's GPUs, you really need SLI/Crossfire using top end cards to pull that off if you want the best image quality and that will require more 3GB+ of vram.

If you are on a budget, then a single top end card with AA turned down would easily suffice and keep vram usage under 3 GB. So to be clear, anyone who wishes to pursue maximum image quality at 1440P+ will likely see 3GB+ used in newer games like BF4 as I've demonstrated.

Sigh. If only 1080p was a dying standard. If anything, it is THE standard now as it matches TV's (and blame manufacturers for pushing dual purpose TV / pc monitor panels)

The new consoles are going to push 1080p 60 fps.

What's the new TV standard after HD? 4k?

We pc gamers will have the niche of gaming at 2560x1440 or 2560x1600 panels; but games will always be happy medium-ed for best performance at 1080p.

And, ffs, why are laptops still stuck with 1366x768?