- Aug 26, 2008
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With the release of the Radeon HD 79XX series with 3GB GDDR5 VRAM and now the GTX 680 2GB with GDDR5 VRAM as well as the rumored upcoming Radeon HD 7990 and GTX 690 with 4GB VRAM we now have videocards with as much memory as complete builds did only a few years ago.
For those of you who have ever nearly filled up an OS hard drive you will know that Windows generally needs enough disk space left over for a page file as large as your system memory is to make an image of it for sleeping / hybernation purposes along with disk caching.
So my question is for those who are using these large memory video cards do you have a preference for maintaining at least enough free system memory for 1 or 2 additional full frame buffers for the graphics memory?
I read in the past that some of the 32-bit editions of even Vista and Windows 7 ran into problems trying to map all of the address space of a graphics card along with a video card when the system total was > 4GB.
With a 64-bit OS this is not a problem, but do people who have these massive frame buffers prefer a 3 to 4 ratio of system memory to video memory like I prefer to maintain?
So that would mean if you purchased one of these 3GB VRAM cards would you run at a minimum 9GB to 12GB of system DRAM?
I'm actually not aware of which games can even fill out a frame buffer this large other than maybe Battlefield 3. Possibly Metro 2033 or some flight simulators? I imagine without a large enough paging file or preferably free system memory it can take a long time to enter / exit one of these games.
To put this in perspective I only just upgraded to 4GB DDR3 1600 memory last summer and in my main gaming machine I only have a GTX 460 768MB GDDR5 video card which is a > 4 to 1 ratio.
Before that I had a 2 X 512MB 9800GT in SLI along with 2GB DDR2-800 system memory which was exactly a 4 to 1 ratio of system memory DRAM to video card VRAM.
Maybe its better to ask what is the mimimum ratio that should be run with a 2GB VRAM card. Is a 2 to 1 ratio 4GB DRAM acceptable or would 6GB or 8GB for a 3 or 4 to 1 ratio be ideal?
For those of you who have ever nearly filled up an OS hard drive you will know that Windows generally needs enough disk space left over for a page file as large as your system memory is to make an image of it for sleeping / hybernation purposes along with disk caching.
So my question is for those who are using these large memory video cards do you have a preference for maintaining at least enough free system memory for 1 or 2 additional full frame buffers for the graphics memory?
I read in the past that some of the 32-bit editions of even Vista and Windows 7 ran into problems trying to map all of the address space of a graphics card along with a video card when the system total was > 4GB.
With a 64-bit OS this is not a problem, but do people who have these massive frame buffers prefer a 3 to 4 ratio of system memory to video memory like I prefer to maintain?
So that would mean if you purchased one of these 3GB VRAM cards would you run at a minimum 9GB to 12GB of system DRAM?
I'm actually not aware of which games can even fill out a frame buffer this large other than maybe Battlefield 3. Possibly Metro 2033 or some flight simulators? I imagine without a large enough paging file or preferably free system memory it can take a long time to enter / exit one of these games.
To put this in perspective I only just upgraded to 4GB DDR3 1600 memory last summer and in my main gaming machine I only have a GTX 460 768MB GDDR5 video card which is a > 4 to 1 ratio.
Before that I had a 2 X 512MB 9800GT in SLI along with 2GB DDR2-800 system memory which was exactly a 4 to 1 ratio of system memory DRAM to video card VRAM.
Maybe its better to ask what is the mimimum ratio that should be run with a 2GB VRAM card. Is a 2 to 1 ratio 4GB DRAM acceptable or would 6GB or 8GB for a 3 or 4 to 1 ratio be ideal?
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