Unable to use more than 4 GB with a GTX 880M of 8GB. Help please.

[FJMS1988]

Hello everybody, I bought a few monts ago a MSI Laptop with a dedicated Nvidia GTX880M graphic card with 8GB of VRAM and I was quite happy with its specs till now.... I have been playing many games since I bought my laptop, which is a GT72 2PE i7-4710HQ 2.50GHz with windows 8.1 x64 and 32GR of RAM, but none of them was very demanding, so I think my graphic card was using just a small part of its memory... The new games I have installed are very much demanding and so I found out that the max amount of VRAM they can read from my graphic card is about 4GB and I don't know why... This problem gives me bad performance, lag, and stuttering, which is supposed to be something I never have to worry about with such a powerful graphic card and laptop... I have been trying to found out where the problem comes from and I am pretty sure that it comes from the graphic card, which only uses half of its abailable memory. GPU-Z shows that my graphic card has indeed 8GB of memory, but it uses only 4GB for all games, could you help me with this please? Thank you very much in advance.

 

[LTC8K6]

Well, it came with either 8 or 4, are you sure you got the one with 8?

What does GPU-Z say?

 

[FJMS1988]

What does GPU-Z say?

This is what it says: http://postimg.org/image/f6ee3dev1/

 

[LTC8K6]

What games would use more than 4gb of VRAM on that laptop, though?

They don't even use 4gb on desktop systems, right?

 

[LTC8K6]

IIRC, very few games can be made to use more than 4gb of VRAM.

 

[FJMS1988]

What games would use more than 4gb of VRAM on that laptop, though?

I play Rome 2 Total War, Attila Total War, The Witcher 3 and Skyrim, which is the one that made me suspect about my VRAM since Skyrim recognizes only 3GB of VRAM but is possible to force it to recognize as much VRAM as your graphic card has with a program called ENB Boost, and even with this program Skyrim says I have 4GB like the rest of games say.

 

[LTC8K6]

I'm not sure what might be wrong, but I have seen test after test that shows that games don't use more than 4gb of VRAM, except in rare cases.

As long as GPU-Z says you have 8Gb of VRAM, I really wouldn't worry about what the games use or report.

 

[Stuka87]

Most games on that machine are only going to use 1.5-3GB. Using more vram does not mean better performance. The Witcher 3 even at ultra at 1080P only uses around 1.8-2GB.

 

[therealnickdanger]

1. How are you measuring VRAM usage?

2. Turn on DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution) and put it up to the max resolution and enable 8X MSAA and Ultra everything, then measure the VRAM usage. (the games will probably be unplayable, but just try it and see what it says)

3. 8GB is more than likely more than you would ever need for 1080p unless you're using 4K or 8K textures...

4. Aren't Kepler cards getting shafted by NVIDIA drivers recently? Or is that a myth?