Will GTX460 1GB SLI be too limited for future games?

[VirtualLarry]

I have a 1920x1200 60Hz 26" LCD monitor, connected via DVI at the moment.

Will future games get more VRAM-heavy, even if I'm only playing at 1200P?

I'm not a huge fan of AA, I rarely use it.

Will two GTX460 1GB cards in SLI continue to be decent for the next few years worth of games, or is it really necessary to upgrade to, say, a 7970, purely for the 3GB of VRAM?

If that's the case, then I will sell my two GTX460 cards while they are still worth something, and bite the bullet and upgrade.

But if not, I would prefer to save money and keep the GTX460s. Also because I do distributed computing, and that generally runs better on NV cards.



Edit: A little Google-Fu later, and I found this thread:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2118943
Seems GTX460 1GB SLI, holds up pretty well at 1920x1200, neck-and-neck with a GTX580, even with 4xAA. That's great news. I might just stick with my GTX460 1GB cards for a few more years.

 

[Puppies04]

2 questions, how many years is a "few" and do you like to play at ultra, high, medium?

 

[Rifter]

Yes, i also run 460 SLI and am running into a Texture limit in some games depending on AA level and method used.

I intend to upgrade to a single card with 3GB or greater texture memory as soon as i can purchase one that will double my current performance, so hopefully kepler or AMD 8xxx series.

 

[Concillian]

Video memory is a little different than other video performance issues. You can likely use 1GB for quite a long time.

Right now most cards are 1GB. Until cards with more than 1GB memory get popular, games will not use much more than 1GB. You'll be able to play games well with 1GB until low end cards commonly use more than 1GB.

This is because the developers control the amount of video memory used by controlling the size of the textures used. They'll assume that at a particular level of performance there will be a certain amount used for frame buffer and MSAA and the remainder is their "budget" for texture buffer. They will not overspend this "budget", because doing so will result in hitching (VERY bad for their customer's experience... very bad).

Right now they are generally budgeting for 1GB total memory available for the video buffer.

Going forward, it looks like games will be making more use of FXAA and SMAA and other post process AA effects. These will mean their texture budgets may grow slightly as they assume less MSAA memory used.

They won't increase their budgets beyond that until a higher memory amount is quite common. (1.5GB or 2 GB).

However, they are running up against another limit... Available addressable memory space for a 32 bit application. No game that I'm aware of is 64 bit. That means they need to limit themselves to 4 GB total addressable space (this includes the combined total of both video memory and system memory used by the application.)

Right now, a typical application will use something like ~700 MB of video memory for textures and 1.2 GB of system memory for the game and keep the total under 2 GB so they don't need to be LAA (Large Address Aware). A select few games have been LAA lately (Skyrim and BF3, most notably) and this opens up the option of more than 1GB of video memory, but I don't think you'll see too many apps using more than 1GB soon.

Even if the budget does increase, there are usually options for texture resolution that allow less memory to be used by loading lower resolution textures. These options will need to be there for people who are using lower end video cards unless the developers want to effectively lock-out a large potential customer-base.

Nobody knows exactly how long 1GB will be the standard. BF3 is the only game I know of that really can make use of more than 1GB at 1920x in stock form. Skyrim can use more if modded with texture packs and such. Most games are console ports for consoles that are limited to 512 MB video memory, and may not even have options to use higher resolution textures on the PC to even utilize more than 512MB without enabling MSAA.

 

[RavenSEAL]

I think your cards should hold up for about 1 more generation, same as mine

 

[Panopticon]

Really depends on settings. BF3 routinely uses 1.9gb of vram on ultra settings, I imagine its the textures that make it go so high though.

 

[RavenSEAL]

Really depends on settings. BF3 routinely uses 1.9gb of vram on ultra settings, I imagine its the textures that make it go so high though.

And you can barely tell the difference between that and high settings

 

[Concillian]

And you can barely tell the difference between that and high settings

but, but, it's Ultra.
If you can't run with everything maxed, you may as well not even buy the game!

Just offering the kind of opinions I get when I bring up this kind of stuff. Don't bother down that path, you won't gain anything and may even drop a few IQ points along the way.

Yes, it's a matter of value, but value has a different meaning to people buying GTX460 / 1GB and 6850 / 6870 GPUs than it does to people buying 7970s.

 

[BD231]

Once BF3 came around people started saying 1gb cards are obsolete, but you can't find 2gb cards for anything less than double what you pay for a 1gb value card and there are practically no performance benefits outside of the added texture memory. Paying twice the price for only a handful of games, if even, doesn't really make sense for a lot of people, but if you're going to spend 200 or more then there's no reason not to go with a 2gb card.

 

[monkeydelmagico]

If you rarely use AA you'll be fine.

Those are great cards.

 

[Throckmorton]

Why don't you just wait and see, and upgrade when you need to?

 

[Rifter]

If you rarely use AA you'll be fine.

Those are great cards.

This is what i have had to do, cut back on AA in some titles. I dont want to have to do this though so i will upgrade as soon as i am able to a 2GB or 3GB card when they hit the performance level of making a upgrade worthwhile.

 

[Vdubchaos]

It depends on your wallet really.

I have 460SLI and it's fine. How future proof? Well no one can really tell. But to be honest games graphical improvements haven't been major, so even money was no object I'm not sure if I would bother.