Video Card RAM important?

[sqeaky4100]

Just bought a EVGA GTX 285 1GB

But noticed EVGA released the 2GB version.

Should I upgrade using Step-up, or is it simply not worth it when 5boxing WoW?

[wowphreak]

The 1 gig version is overkill for WoW :P

[Herc130]

Just ordered an eVGA GTX285 as well, mine should be here by thursday. You got 90 days to figure out for step-up, I'd suggest you use most of those days. Play with your new toy for a bit and if you still want to step up, do it later and get another new toy. I only do 1 computer 1 account and there is no game I play that 2GB of video ram really matters, but I do know that a few games (read 1) makes use of more then 1gb of video ram and more will come out as far as what difference more video ram has for boxing multiple accounts on one computer, ask people who use 4850x2's. Whatever improvement they got from their last cards in MMO's is probably not because of the dual gpu's.

Maybe in 90 days RV870 releases (actually it should be out next month). Doubtfull GT300 will be out till around Nov. but there are roumors that NV will release GT212 (and I'd bet money it will be right when RV870 releases or shortly after) and although I am not sure how useful a GTX285 with 2gb would be to me over having one with only 1gb, I'd say the next GTX 2XX card will run cooler, faster and probably have an option for 2GB video ram as well and will probably release within 90 days. I think you and I are in a good position. New toy to play with that no doubt will run games better then our old cards and 90 days to figure out if we want to trade it in on whatever the GT212 will be called or go for the GTX285 2gb after all (or maybe jump ship and go ATI with RV870). Also, time enough to see how GT300 is panning out and possibly not do a step-up at all and just live with GTX285 till GT300.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I would think that the more ram you have on the video card the less your cpu has to move data from the system ram to the video card (ususally the bottleneck in boxing), and the less traffic on your pci/ram buss.

If the costs are similar I would get the 2G.

[wowphreak]

I would think that the more ram you have on the video card the less your cpu has to move data from the system ram to the video card (ususally the bottleneck in boxing), and the less traffic on your pci/ram buss.

If the costs are similar I would get the 2G.

it doesn't matter whether or not yeh got 512 megs or 2 gigs of video ram the same amount of data gets move around.
Recommended by blizzard is 128 megs
http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=21054

[Sam DeathWalker]

3D graphics processor with Vertex and Pixel Shader capability with 128 MB VRAM, such as an ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT class card or better

In the same line where they also recomend a 7600?

I don't think these recomendations are for running 5 wow's, but rather for running 1 wow.

[Sajuuk]

I would think that the more ram you have on the video card the less your cpu has to move data from the system ram to the video card (ususally the bottleneck in boxing), and the less traffic on your pci/ram buss.

If the costs are similar I would get the 2G.No...just no.

I'm five boxing just fine on a 9600GT with 512MB ram. If anything it's your SYSTEM RAM that's a bottleneck... I just ordered six more gigs because for me wow was going over 1gig per instance in northrend. Granted, I'm not playing at insane resolutions, but still it's system ram that's getting eaten up, not video ram.

Did a quickie newegg search. I'd step-up for kicks, since it's only a 50 dollar or so difference at first glance. Although I don't know if you're going to see any REAL difference in performance.

[Otlecs]

This has piqued my interest because I've often wondered the same, and have no idea how this side of gaming technology works.

If I'm running five WoWs, I would have *thought* that each instance of WoW would be loading textures and other video-graphicy-type gubbins (see, I know all the terminology...) into the video RAM independently.

Like Sam, I would have *thought* that more video memory means that the textures wouldn't get bumped out of video memory so often, meaning less system->video memory transfers.

Why is that wrong?

Is it that the video subsystem is clever enough to recognise that the textures are actually the same even though they come from different processes, so the video RAM demand doesn't increase as you run more WoWs?

Can somebody explain in simple terms how that works? Or point me at an article I can read to understand this a bit better.

Cheers,
Otlecs.

[Kayley]

This has piqued my interest because I've often wondered the same, and have no idea how this side of gaming technology works.

If I'm running five WoWs, I would have *thought* that each instance of WoW would be loading textures and other video-graphicy-type gubbins (see, I know all the terminology...) into the video RAM independently.

Like Sam, I would have *thought* that more video memory means that the textures wouldn't get bumped out of video memory so often, meaning less system->video memory transfers.

Why is that wrong?


I don't think it is wrong. But WoW isn't really taxing on the GPU (Even on Ultra settings you still hit a CPU bottleneck :D. Bring on more quad optimizations prz) so 1gb is overkill. Unless for some reason you needed to play with all the windows open (somehow hah) at 2560x1600, then you would need the extra vRAM.
That's just my two cents, although I'm just a tech enthusiast.. :P
NOT A PRO PC PERSON!
Ciao

[Otlecs]

I don't think it is wrong. But WoW isn't really taxing on the GPU (Even on Ultra settings you still hit a CPU bottleneck . Bring on more quad optimizations prz) so 1gb is overkill.
Hmmm.

I'm not sure I follow the "wow doesn't strain the GPU so 1GB of video memory is overkill" logic. How is there any relationship between processor (GPU) load and the amount of video memory an application demands?

The more I think about this topic, the more confused I make myself.

I can understand an argument that says that video RAM doesn't matter so much because the frame buffer needs the same amount of memory regardless of whether it's a single app running at (say) 1900 x 1200 or (say) 5 apps running over the same amount of screen real-estate (given the same amount of frame buffering).

But I always imagined that textures (and maybe other graphical objects?) took up a significant amount of video RAM, and that's where I thought having more video memory would be a win for multiple instances of WoW.

I always knew I didn't know very much about this, but it wasn't until I started thinking it through that I realised just how little I really do know :wacko:

[Gadzooks]

This would be a good question over at the WOW Tech Support forums, see if the CMs there can answer this, I'm curious too.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Ya I six box "fine" with 9600 1/2 G also.

Thats not meaning that more video ram wont help.

If you read a lot of the hardware threads here you find that the number one bottleneck is moving infromation (textures) from hard drive to video card. Clearly the game dosnt really tax the cpu calculations or GPU calculations, its the moving of data. When you get more system ram you dont need to access the hard drive as much and that shows a LOT of improvement because hard drive access is very slow. If you have sufficient system ram then more video ram means that you dont need to move data from system ram to video ram as much. I mean that obvious, if the texture is already in the video ram you don't have to get it from the system ram. Now this impovement won't show up as MUCH of an increase as more system ram because access to system ram is WAY faster then access of hard drive. BUT thats not to say more video ram is "overkill".

More video ram is better BUT more system ram is better still.

Its completly not true that the fact your GPU is not at 100percent means that more video ram is not needed. The reason your GPU is not at 100percent is that it has no data in its ram to work on ... but ya even when the ram is full the GPU still dosnt go 100percent as the game just dosnt demand it.

And why do you think you run 60fps in middle of no place and 10fps it city. Cause you have to load tons of textures of other characters in cites, and none in middle of no place.

[Tdawg2008]

I 6 box fine on EQ with a 9800GT which is 512mb DDR3. After a few hours of boxing, I can feel the heat pouring out of the back of my pc where the video card is located. I can only imagine what an overclocked card would do. Also, on newegg, some guy says they recommend a 750w power supply for the beast. So, its really going to drain power.

[wowphreak]

I 5 box with an ati radeon 9250 its has 256 megs of ram so yeh I think 1 gig is overkill.

[moosejaw]

A couple of months ago I was wondering about this very topic. I headed over to Toms hardware and poured over video card benchmarks. What I came away with was this. The more screen real estate you are gaming on (pixel wise) the more the extra video ram helps prop up fps. You could see the 512 mb cards fall on thier face at the big resolutions (i.e. 2500 ish), while the 1gb cards would hold up frame rate much better.

So I figured if I am using 1 full monitor and part of another monitor to render on I should probable get as much video ram as I can afford. Granted I don't play max aa or anything like that but I have the headroom for intense fights now. Coupled with an I7 my EQ2 game play is fantastic.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I gonna say that the

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-gtx,2270-3.html

Radeon HD 4870 1 GB is a solid buy right now, even though I myself only buy nvida cards.


For $500 plus you can get this 2 gpu, 1.7G card ... .

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121296

Or for who know how much you can go to 3 gpu's:

http://www.pclaunches.com/graphic_cards/asus_launches_worlds_first_onboard_triple_rv670pro _graphics_card.php

[moosejaw]

Radeon HD 4870 1 GB is a solid buy right now, even though I myself only buy nvida cards.

This is my gaming video card right now. My first ATI card in about 8 years. The drivers blow for opengl though. My Home Theater PC has an 8800gt 512.

[Lax]

I can clear this one up.

The backbuffers for each of your 3D game windows must reside in the Video RAM. If you run out of Video RAM and try to launch another WoW, the game will complain about not being able to launch. The amount of Video RAM required for each backbuffer is probably going to be roughly Resolution x Bit-depth (educated guess, backed up by years of staring at memory usage numbers, etc), so with 1680x1050 at 32-bit color, 1680x1050x32 = 56,448,000 or about 54MB per window at that resolution. Likewise, 800x600x32 = 15,360,000, or about 14.5MB per window. The higher the resolution, the more Video RAM you need.

Secondarily, textures are loaded to Video RAM if available in many cases (though not all). If you play at 1680x1050, to reach the "recommended" 128MB the game would need to load about 74MB of textures into Video RAM. Most of the textures will be loaded after Character Select (hence some portion of the loading time) and of course during gameplay when you run into an area that needs other textures, or see other characters with armor that wasnt loaded, etc (hence the lag). This is also per window, unless a) you are running Vista or later, and b) the game is designed to use shared texture resources (I don't know any games off hand that do this).

That's the bulk of Video RAM usage.

The most common problems you will experience if you do not have enough Video RAM is the inability to launch new windows (mitigated by launching all of them at the same time, and only going past Character Select with all of the windows running), and possibly missing textures in the game (though this typically only happens if you also do not have enough System RAM as well). Performance will of course be degraded if a lot of textures have to be loaded in System RAM instead of Video RAM, but you may not even realize it as this issue doesn't clearly present itself ;)

That said, you could probably run 8 WoWs on the memory provided by a 1GB video card without running out of Video RAM, following the recommended 128MB per WoW. You probably don't need 2GB on your video card for multi-boxing -- if you're running more than 8 on one PC you'd probably want to be running 2 video cards (and not in SLI or Crossfire), and you'd want them to be fast as hell. You'd probably also want at least one i7, but if there's a motherboard that supports 2 i7s, you'd probably want that instead.

If you're running 5 WoWs or less, then just stick with 1GB or less unless the price difference is negligible.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Secondarily, textures are loaded to Video RAM if available in many cases (though not all). If you play at 1680x1050, to reach the "recommended" 128MB the game would need to load about 74MB of textures into Video RAM. Most of the textures will be loaded after Character Select (hence some portion of the loading time) and of course during gameplay when you run into an area that needs other textures, or see other characters with armor that wasnt loaded, etc (hence the lag).

This is exactly what causes lag (low framerates). No question the MORE video ram you have the less you have to go to system ram or hard drive for textures.


probably want to be running 2 video cards (and not in SLI or Crossfire),

There is no "overkill", get as much on board video ram as you can. BUT ALSO avoid crossfire or sli boards (i.e. boards with 2 gpu in crossfire or sli config). And that gets us right back to the:

Radeon HD 4870 1 GB

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3415




The Asus GTX-295 is one single GPU physically in that it is all in one casing and connects to a single PCI-E slot, but it's actually two GPU's each on it's own PCB and connected with an internal SLI bridge.


Actually the 2851G is

http://news.firingsquad.com/hardware/msi_n285_gtx_superpipe_oc_geforce_gtx_285_review/

is fine, but coster then the radon.


But the OP is right:

http://www.guru3d.com/news/point-of-view-releases-2gb-geforce-gtx-285/

Thats the "who cares about money" board.

So the best is the 285 2G but the best for the price is the 4870 1G.

but DO not think that 2X 4870 is the win, avoid sli or crossfire ...

[Lax]

http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/../forum/icon/quoteS.png Quoted

Secondarily, textures are loaded to Video RAM if available in many cases (though not all). If you play at 1680x1050, to reach the "recommended" 128MB the game would need to load about 74MB of textures into Video RAM. Most of the textures will be loaded after Character Select (hence some portion of the loading time) and of course during gameplay when you run into an area that needs other textures, or see other characters with armor that wasnt loaded, etc (hence the lag).
This is exactly what causes lag (low framerates). No question the MORE video ram you have the less you have to go to system ram or hard drive for textures. Incorrect.

Textures are loaded only into Video and System RAM. They will never be loaded into Virtual Memory, which can be stored on the hard drive in a swap file. The game will never use as much Video RAM as it can. -- it is optimized to only load textures on demand, or it will always load various common textures. There will always be loading times during gameplay, due to this optimization. This is why SSDs make an improvement in texture load times during gameplay. Even if you have a 16GB video card, the game is not going to load all possible textures, by design. If the game did load all textures, your performance when multiboxing would drop simply because the game will be forced to put textures in System RAM when it runs out of Video RAM anyway.


There is no "overkill", get as much on board video ram as you can. BUT ALSO avoid crossfire or sli boards (i.e. boards with 2 gpu in crossfire or sli config). And that gets us right back to the:

Radeon HD 4870 1 GB

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3415 There is definitely overkill as far as Video RAM. Just like System RAM, if you never reach 50% in use at any given time, you might as well have 50% less RAM. Therefore, you should determine how much Video RAM you're actually going to use, and if that doesn't reach 1GB in the first place, don't pay a premium just for an extra 1GB on an otherwise identical card.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Ok three possible storage areas:

1) Video Ram
2) System Ram
3) Hard Drive / SSD

You are saying that the game sets aside 128G (or some fixed figure) of video ram for its buffer and textures, per instance. Same with system ram it just sets aside a spicfic amount? What about casch hits, it dosnt look first to video and system ram to see if the texture is there (loaded as some old time in the past)? It just goes to the file in the wow folder it needs even if the data is in the system ram or the video ram? I see it would check but there is a fixed limit, if you are in a place where there are more textures then that limit it has to reload. And they set a limit cause of the 2G limit on 32bit apps. They must have upped the limit with the higher textures (4X more?) in WotLK.

Ya it won't store in vitrual memory.

Getting data, even from a SSD is way slower then getinng the texturs from system ram.

So it loads the zone textures (hence the small stutter when you enter a zone), some common textures and then if you see a new player or mob it goes to the wow folder to get that texture, without checking to see if that texture is already in system or video ram?

If you run two instances and the texture is already in video ram from one instance can the 2nd instance access that? I suppose not.

Overall that seems so inefficient....

You have any links where I can read about all this?


At any rate putting the wow folder in a system ram hard drive (makeing a hard drive out of system ram) is the way to go.

Well if that is all true then you are right if the game is not using the video ram (and it dosnt check to see if the data is already there) then 1G is more then enough.


OK the files are here:


WoW stores models as .M2 files, which is a WoW proprietary file format. It contains a lot of data such as bones, vertices, textures used, animations and more. These .M2 files are stored in compressed .MPQ files. The .MPQ files of interest are common.mpq, expansion.mpq and patch-x.mpq in the WoW\data directory

Ok its correct that over 1G is overkill:

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.asp?m=100643697&mpage=1&key=


This is why you only use single gpu with wow:

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=8864927435&sid=1&pageNo=3

[Lax]

You are saying that the game sets aside 128G (or some fixed figure) of video ram for its buffer and textures, per instance. Same with system ram it just sets aside a spicfic amount? What about casch hits, it dosnt look first to video and system ram to see if the texture is there (loaded as some old time in the past)? It just goes to the file in the wow folder it needs even if the data is in the system ram or the video ram? The game doesn't necessarily set aside a fixed figure. It is optimizing for minimal memory usage under any circumstance, to allow people with low end computers to play the game. It can't just assume it should be allowed to use up all of the available memory in order to speed certain tasks up. The textures loaded in memory "are" the cache, and they will be used from there as long as they are loaded. It does not need to go to the file in the WoW folder if it's already loaded (for any given window). It doesn't keep re-loading it from disk if it's still loaded, and it's loaded at least until it is no longer referenced by an active object, possibly longer depending on the game's optimizations. For example, when you enter an instance, most textures will no longer be used.

If you run two instances and the texture is already in video ram from one instance can the 2nd instance access that? I suppose not. I briefly mentioned this in my first post: If a) you are running Vista or later, and b) the game is specifically designed to use shared textures, then the 2nd instance can re-use the same texture memory. I do not believe World of Warcraft is designed for this, and I do not know of any games off hand that are.

With 5 WoWs running at 1680x1050x32, I go from 966MB Texture Memory available to 831MB available at login screen, so about 27MB each just to launch (my estimate of backbuffer size seems to be off by a factor of 2), and I drop to around 550-590MB available in Wintergrasp attacking the keep with a few full raids in a massive lagfest, and roughly the same in Dalaran. So I could run 5 WoWs on a 512MB card and not run out of Video RAM even what would seem to be the most intense areas -- that's with WoW graphics settings all at the minimum for performance reasons. I just zoned into Gundrak, and my available Texture Memory went up to 770MB.

Texture Memory is a combination of all Video RAM on the video card handling the game instance, plus some System RAM set aside by the system architecture. Textures are loaded into whichever of those two areas that DirectX and the game determine is appropriate.

Getting data from ANY long-term storage device is, indeed, slower than retrieving it from RAM. That's why RAM is used for short-term needed data, and hard drives, SSD/flash, etc are used for long-term data ;) A RAM drive would certainly be a great idea, if you've got enough RAM to mirror your entire WoW installation and still enough leftover to actually play the game. I've got 8GB free at the moment after running 5 WoWs but my WoW data folder is nearly 14GB. I'd need probably about 20GB of RAM to do that effectively, but I might try a few data files on a RAM drive to test what the actual effect is.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I'd need probably about 20GB of RAM to do that effectively, but I might try a few data files on a RAM drive to test what the actual effect is.

Sadly you cannot, all of wow has to be in the same folder ....

[Lax]

Actually I can, and so can anyone else that uses ISBoxer, by virtualizing the files. :)

[Otlecs]

For the record, you can use symbolic links (as distinct from junction points) on both files and folders in Windows to store files wherever you want. I'm always messing about with different setups to increase my perceived game peformance in my SSD / Raptor / regular stripe set configuration!

Thanks for the clarification on the technical details Lax - that's very interesting. It's also in line with what I would have expected just from critical thinking without any real knowledge to back it up, which is always nice :)

So for WoW at least, single GPU cards and "more" video memory are both Good Things, up to around 1GB after which it (arguably?) becomes wasted but not detremental.

Good stuff.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Ya I am really surprised as how its done, Ill bet they do the occlusion tests first before they even load the texturs. I.e. if someone is behind a wall right next to you they don't load that texture. They don't preload for people near you or anything it would seem. Not the way I would have designed it but I can see good reasons why they would do it this way as predicting who might come into your field of view is wastefull if that person dosn't.

This is easy to test just go to any crowed area and spin in place and see if you stutter.

So it would appear that the game very often is going for small packets of data from the wow data folder, on a continuous basis. Such info surely will let us optimize our hardware.

I see that my arguments in favor of Lax were not in vain.