How much Vram is enough?

[Jacky60]

Given that hardocp found even 4gb of memory on the 670 4GB wanting and 3gb clearly insufficient on the radeon 7970 how much memory is enough for multimonitor (3x1920/1080 or 3x1920/1200) gaming? Hardocp talk about 8gb being necessary for 8xMSAA in surround plus faster GPU's. I can't remember when if ever top of the range cards have been found to be held back by video memory so close to a games launch.

I don't want to sacrifice image quality when I go multi-monitor, for me that's not a good trade off.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/01/14/asus_geforce_gtx_670_directcu_ii_4gb_sli_review/3

 

[lehtv]

Multimonitor gaming as in 1920x1080 * 3?

3GB should be enough for most games. I would not want to be limited to 2GB so the options are 7950 3GB or 7970 3GB Crossfire, and GTX 670 4GB SLI. 6GB seems excessive, only really useful for tri-fire or quadfire setups. Two 7970's aren't really fast enough to properly take advantage of that much VRAM.

 

[aaksheytalwar]

Assuming current gen games of 2012 with 4x msaa or lower

Single monitor
1600p or lower
3gb is more than enuf

3x monitor 1080p
4gb is more than enough except in a rare case and/or with insane MSAA/SSAA

3x monitor 1600p
4-6gb is enuf but no amount of gpu power is adequate

6x 1080p
At least 4-6gb is needed min with at least 3x high end gpus

 

[CakeMonster]

You should specify that you're talking about multi monitor in the topic title.

 

[lavaheadache]

if you don't want to sacrifice image quality then don't got multi monitor

 

[Pottuvoi]

It's quite easy to calculate framebuffer memory usage.
resolution * (colordepth + zbuffer) * MSAA samples. (color depth is usually either 4bytes or 8bytes zbuffer is 4 bytes.

IE.
Let's take worst case first.
You have 3 2560x1440 monitors and use 8xMSAA on forward renderer which has 64bit HDR framebuffer.

7680*1440*(8+4)*8=1061683200kB
/1024/1024=1012.5MB

With deferred renderer you add all the other attributes you need for G-buffer.. (normal specluar etc.. to get final amount.)
After this it comes to polygons and textures etc. (and resolved backbuffer..)

 

[Qbah]

Sky is the limit IMO.

My modded Skyrim eats over 3GB now in some places, at 1080p. But that's with some sick sick textures