Which games, if any, benefit from 8GB video card RAM over 4GB, and how much benefit?

[Actaeon]

4GB is needed today and the minimum for a high end card right now. There was a huge jump in VRAM usage over the past few years due to the consoles. Without another batch of consoles, I don't expect VRAM usage to jump up rapidly anytime time soon.

8GB is nice but more than needed for a 390.

Here is a good article detailing VRAM usage at various resolutions.

http://www.tweaktown.com/tweakipedia/90/much-vram-need-1080p-1440p-4k-aa-enabled/index.html

 

[Deders]

4GB is needed today and the minimum for a high end card right now. There was a huge jump in VRAM usage over the past few years due to the consoles. Without another batch of consoles, I don't expect VRAM usage to jump up rapidly anytime time soon.

8GB is nice but more than needed for a 390.

Here is a good article detailing VRAM usage at various resolutions.

http://www.tweaktown.com/tweakipedia/90/much-vram-need-1080p-1440p-4k-aa-enabled/index.html

I agree with your post, but you have to bear in mind with the article that only GTAV and Mordor are really representative of games that make use of Vram above 2GB. The others are very well optimised and fully playable without any performance issues with 2GB, at least until you get to 4K. That might be a different story.

 

[tential]

8 gigs won't help anything right now, but if a new high end card came out today, it should have 8gb of ram. 4GB is no longer enough and 6GB will stop being enough very quickly. Vram requirements has skyrocketed recently right along with disk space requirements.
I think its funny though, because I was playing Crysis 3 last night and that game looks totally stunning, better than any new game that I have seen or played myself. It looks better than Far Cry 4 and GTA V and many other games, yet Crysis 3 only uses about 2.5GB of Vram @ 1440p, fully maxed with 4XAA. How is that? How is that possible? I think new games simply inflate their requirements to sell GPU's or something funky is going on.

I mean I think new games just haven't been REMOTELY optimized compared to older games. I think Devs are just using VRAM like this because they're too lazy to optimize games like Crysis 3 was. The fact that we haven't definitively surpassed Crysis 3 is just a testament to how HORRENDOUS we've done with graphical fidelity improvements.

 

[Actaeon]

I agree with your post, but you have to bear in mind with the article that only GTAV and Mordor are really representative of games that make use of Vram above 2GB. The others are very well optimised and fully playable without any performance issues with 2GB, at least until you get to 4K. That might be a different story.

Yeah, it depends on your resolution and settings. Farcry 4 also used 2+ GB of RAM even at 1080p. I guess what I should be saying is that 4GB is the minimum to buy for a high end card right now. 4GB isn't required to play games, but I think it gives a healthy enough buffer/headroom for any advanced settings, higher resolutions, and future games. I would not recommend a high end card under 4GB right now.

8GB is more than needed.

 

[Deders]

Yeah, it depends on your resolution and settings. Farcry 4 also used 2+ GB of RAM even at 1080p. I guess what I should be saying is that 4GB is the minimum to buy for a high end card right now. 4GB isn't required to play games, but I think it gives a healthy enough buffer/headroom for any advanced settings, higher resolutions, and future games. I would not recommend a high end card under 4GB right now.

8GB is more than needed.

Ahh yes I must have missed Far Cry 4.

You're right, for under 4K 4GB is plenty. I seem to remember at 4K though that the FuryX suffered compared to the 980TI in games that use a lot of Vram due to the 4GB limit.

The furyX would generally lead in games under 4GB, but the tables turned when more was needed.

 

[Mondozei]

AMD also tried to spin this as a positive, that more than 4GB wasn't necessary when using HBM for this generation. Joe Macri of AMD claimed that HBM has secret sauce that makes 4GB of HBM capacity > 4GB GDDR5 capacity. What he was actually talking about were better drivers to manage the memory (which probably helps in every situation).

http://wccftech.com/amd-addresses-capacity-limitation-concern-hbm/

As far as I've seen, the 4GB capacity has NOT proven to be a limitation, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

There's no need to do that when we have hard data. Fiji has advanced color compression technology which makes it use the memory bandwidth 40% more efficiently. See Ryan's review on this site.

Tonga was the first uarch to implement this.

And anyway, Scott Wasson at TR(who recently got hired by AMD) showed that at even 4K, the 290X and the 980 did fine in Shadow of Mordor.

You basically don't need 8 GB today as it stands. That may change in two years time since we've seen tremendous VRAM inflation in recent years.

I'd be curious to see VRAM isage for Fallout 4 with a ton of mods at 1440p or higher.

 

[2is]

Sure we do. Compare two of the same GPU (with different VRAM amounts) and test for min/avg/max fps and frame timing. I'm pretty sure that this has been done before and shown inconclusive results... or at least "academic".

http://techreport.com/blog/28800/how-much-video-memory-is-enough

No, we don't, that gives us information for 2 whole games and the cards being tested aren't even the same ones. Not everyone has access to identical cards with different VRAM and not all games will have been tested in these types of reviews, including that techreport article.

Even if you do manage to get your hands on two identical cards with different vram amounts, you still won't know to what extent the extra vram matters, there's new games being released all the time so unless you have a dynamically updating database that tests each demanding new game with two identical GPU's with different vram amounts, all you'll know is how much vram is being utilized, you wont' know if it's "needed"

 

[Mercennarius]

Just for reference I just ran the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark with the latest update in both DX11 and DX12 and this is what GPU-Z recorded:

DX11 Maximum VRAM: 4,067MB
DX12 Maximum VRAM: 4,338MB

 

[RussianSensation]

No, we don't, that gives us information for 2 whole games and the cards being tested aren't even the same ones. Not everyone has access to identical cards with different VRAM and not all games will have been tested in these types of reviews, including that techreport article.

Even if you do manage to get your hands on two identical cards with different vram amounts, you still won't know to what extent the extra vram matters, there's new games being released all the time so unless you have a dynamically updating database that tests each demanding new game with two identical GPU's with different vram amounts, all you'll know is how much vram is being utilized, you wont' know if it's "needed"

That's what sites like GameGPU do. How else did we find out that 2GB wasn't enough for many titles? It's because 2GB cards tanked while 3GB cards didn't. When there is a VRAM bottleneck, the performance drops so dramatically or the game experiences constant stutters that it becomes immediately know it's a VRAM bottleneck, not a memory bandwidth or GPU bottleneck. You should know what a VRAM bottleneck is like since you have 680 2GB SLI (i.e., you have a lot of GPU horsepower to turn up settings/textures high enough to run into massive VRAM stutters/fps drops. Once you do, you'll never forget what VRAM bottlenecks feel like because a game becomes a near slide-show or stutters so bad it's 100% unplayable). For a professional reviewer, it wouldn't be hard at all to compare GTX970, GTX980, R9 290/X and see if there are big stutters with the 970. Since 290/290X and 970 are pretty similar in performance and since 980 has the full 4GB of VRAM, it would be extremely easy to figure out which game needs more than 3.5GB of VRAM from direct testing.

So far, none of the sites that noted 2GB VRAM bottlenecks have let us down. With Digital Foundry, GameGPU, TPU, Sweclockers, Guru3D, TechSpot, there are so many sites that will provide sufficient information to show when 3.5GB will become an issue vs. 4GB and the same on 4GB (Fury X) vs. 6GB (980Ti).

BTW, you do not need necessarily have to test 2 identical GPUs to diagnose a VRAM bottleneck. Sometimes it's just obvious because the performance falls off a cliff (mortal komba t x) or performance is a practical slide-show such as in Batman AK or F1 2015 on a 2GB card:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37892195&postcount=12

 

[Innokentij]

ARK uses 6,1GB of VRAM of my 980TI monitored with evga precison x, but that game is a POS mess technicaly speaking. Looks like quake 2.5 and runs like professional ubisoft title

 

[2is]

That's what sites like GameGPU do. How else did we find out that 2GB wasn't enough for many titles? It's because 2GB cards tanked while 3GB cards didn't. When there is a VRAM bottleneck, the performance drops so dramatically or the game experiences constant stutters that it becomes immediately know it's a VRAM bottleneck, not a memory bandwidth or GPU bottleneck. You should know what a VRAM bottleneck is like since you have 680 2GB SLI (i.e., you have a lot of GPU horsepower to turn up settings/textures high enough to run into massive VRAM stutters/fps drops. Once you do, you'll never forget what VRAM bottlenecks feel like because a game becomes a near slide-show or stutters so bad it's 100% unplayable). For a professional reviewer, it wouldn't be hard at all to compare GTX970, GTX980, R9 290/X and see if there are big stutters with the 970. Since 290/290X and 970 are pretty similar in performance and since 980 has the full 4GB of VRAM, it would be extremely easy to figure out which game needs more than 3.5GB of VRAM from direct testing.

So far, none of the sites that noted 2GB VRAM bottlenecks have let us down. With Digital Foundry, GameGPU, TPU, Sweclockers, Guru3D, TechSpot, there are so many sites that will provide sufficient information to show when 3.5GB will become an issue vs. 4GB and the same on 4GB (Fury X) vs. 6GB (980Ti).

BTW, you do not need necessarily have to test 2 identical GPUs to diagnose a VRAM bottleneck. Sometimes it's just obvious because the performance falls off a cliff (mortal komba t x) or performance is a practical slide-show such as in Batman AK or F1 2015 on a 2GB card:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37892195&postcount=12

I think you're missing my point.

How about Just Casue 3 or even Black Ops 3? Both those games are vram hogs, how much of that vram is actually needed? Have they been tested with two GPU's with different vram amount? If they haven't, well, you're just left with guess work, which is my point. You can't always look at vram usage and assume it's not needed. I'm not saying you can never look at vram usage, I'm simply saying you can't always look at it and know what's what. The game in question needs to have been tested with the hardware in question. otherwise it's guess work. In other words, if the game in question hasn't been tested with different vram configurations, the only way an end user without the means to test themselves can be sure they're not running out of vram is to have more vram then what's being reported as used.

And yes, i'm well aware of what a vram bottleneck looks like, especially now that I've went to a 1440p screen, but I've got a 980Ti on the way :thumbsup: which I'm actually about to start a new thread on because I have some questions, maybe you'll have the answer to them if you feel like venturing over to the parent forum.

 

[guskline]

2is: You will be VERY happy with the GTX980TI

 

[Face2Face]

In my experience, you can max out everything fine at 1080p with 3 gigs, but 3 gigs wont cut it at 1440p, you'll get intermittent hitching. 1080p is silky smooth though.

I'm actually smooth @ 1440p with Ultra settings + Ultra Textures - no hitching or anything... only 3GB

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t2zOxhc6qc

 

[Actaeon]

You'll love the 980Ti, congrats. I just picked one up a few weeks ago and its been great. I've been playing at 4K with promising framerates, it should be blazing fast at 1440p.