Video Card RAM important?

[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/...tx,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/Produc...82E16814121296

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

http://www.pclaunches.com/graphic_ca...phics_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...tx_285_review/

is fine, but coster then the radon.


But the OP is right:

http://www.guru3d.com/news/point-of-...force-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]

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.