Video Card... Is more Vram or stronger GPU better?

[nodoze]

Video Card... Is more Vram or stronger GPU better?

When multi-boxing 5+ WoW clients, is it better for the Video Card to have more Vram or a stronger GPU?

currently the two cards I am looking at are:

- AMD Radeon HD 6870 - 1GB;

- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 - 2GB;

Since I am using ISBoxer on one monitor with multiple WoW running, I am not sure if the video card's GPU or Vram is more important.

I believe the HD6870 is a stronger GPU but the GTX460 has double the Vram (2GB vs 1GB).


Anyone have any thoughts or recommendations?

[nodoze]

Since I use ISBoxer to multi-box, I also posted this in the ISBoxer forums... I recieved the following reply from Lax who is active on both forums:

7, 2009 9:32 pm
Sun Nov 28, 2010 10:38 am by lax
Re: Video Card... Is more Vram or stronger GPU better?

Great question, I am sure a lot of people would benefit from the answer to this one.

The answer, hands down, is the GPU.

Adding more RAM (be it VRAM, system RAM, etc) is ONLY useful when you would otherwise run out. 1GB is plenty for multiboxing today's MMOs. Your VRAM is mostly going to be consumed by textures, and the screen buffers (each pixel on the screen probably uses at least 4 bytes, so a 1920x1200 window for example probably would use about 9MB). Textures are also typically moved between system RAM and VRAM as needed, so your system RAM can usually pick up the slack.

A faster GPU, on the other hand, (or faster VRAM) is going to improve overall performance (FPS). Always. And that's why faster GPU > more VRAM.

http://isboxer.com/forum/viewtopic.p...&t=825&start=0

[Sajuuk]

I love Lax.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Well for the first time ever that I can recall I am going to have to disagree with Lax.

A faster GPU is better if you want the same FPS with more effects. Its the GPU that determines how many effects you can run at a given FPS.

BUT that assumes that the textures are all avalaible in the VRAM when the GPU wants them.

If they are not and the system has to go to SSD or Hard Drive to get those textures it matters not how fast the GPU is, because that delay is going to be just a ton by comparison.

Considering that the data file for wow is about 23G, assumeing thats mostly textures (well sound is what 3G?), would that mean that any given texture may or may not be available.

Just simple logic says that if you have 2G on the Vram vs 1G you have TWICE the chanch of having the texture you need available and need to go to the SSD or HD 1/2 the time.

Now of course in an instance, or even a 15 man BG you might have all the textures you want, but in Org or during a big raid I really doubt 1G will cut it. PLUS PLUS

We don't know if wow has knowledge of other clients as far as textures go. You might have the texture in VRAM you need for client number 1, under client number 2, and number 1 client still goes to the HD/SSD for that same texture that is in VRAM. So if you run 5 clients, if the above is the case, then you only have 200MB for each clients textures which again means a lot more moveing of data from SSD/HD to VRAM.

Textures are also typically moved between system RAM and VRAM as needed

Ok if the textures are in fact in system ram they will move to Vram very very fast, but why would you assume the textures to be in system ram and not on SSD/HD? Sure would be nice if thats the fact, if you have 16G ram and only using 5G or whatever for 5 clients is wow going to put 11G of textures in the rest of your ram, and if so can each client see it?

I have a strong feeling that all the clients are completly independant and have no knowledge of other clients ram contents, I hope I am wrong but ....

This is kinda easy to test if you don't have a SSD but have a HD and at least 8G of system ram. Just run around org - is the HD light blinking like mad, then its not in system ram .....

Man, I hope nobody /wrists after thinking moving people out of Dalaran would reduce lag. Org is a huge PITA for me now; about like Dalaran was during prime time but ALL the time now. And there's a lot more load stuttering in the other old world zones. Flying through the Barrens is amusing listening to the drives grind.

http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=33121




Anyway I could well be wrong but I would go with the 2G VRAM over the better GPU for sure. Also 460 is not that far from top of the line that you are going to get a HUGE jump in performance with a better GPU.

I say gets the VRAM!

[Sajuuk]

You're saying there's a bottleneck between VRAM and sysRAM when there really is none that we know of.

[Sam DeathWalker]

There is no bottleneck between vram and system ram, if the textures are in system ram you are OK, and Lax is right go with faster GPU.


I just don't think the textures are in system ram ..... they are on the SSD/HD, or if they are in system ram they are there just for one client out of five (if you are five boxing on a single machine). I hope I am wrong but ....

You think WoW and Win7 are going to keep textures is system ram available if for example you have 16 gig ram in your system and you are using 5G for running 5 clients (and OS), the other 11G is going to have textures by some method or other, that would be nice but please explain how or what is doing it. I really doubt WoW is coded to the advantage of multiboxing, even though it should be.

And making one client aware of what textures are available to another client? Thats really a strech if you belive that is occuring.


Again its not hard to prove - does your HD drive light blink really fast? Then your computer is going to the HD for textures and they are not in system ram.

[nodoze]

Thanks everyone for all the input and I really appreciate both the www.dual-boxing.com & www.isboxer.com forums !

This computer is mainly a Christmas present for my brother who I am trying to help get into multi-boxiing (he currently only has 1 account but his current PC can barely play it well). I will use it some when at his place (we live fairly close to each other and I go over there to game some of of the time instead of being on vent). I originally got this for 5 WoW clients but am thinking that we may also try 10 on it since my brother will now also have 5 accounts and between the both of us we will now have 10 total accounts.

My research indicated that the HD68XX line was scaling via CrossFire much better than the current Nvida SLI implementations but after reading the guidance on LAX's site that SLI & Crossfire aren't good ideas with ISBoxer I decided to just focus on one big card for now.

I also took LAX's comments on another tread about more cores being better for multiple clients so I went with the AMD Phenom™ II X6 1090T Black Edition Six-Core CPU instead of a cheaper 3core that I was going to try to use & unlock a 4th core. The cool thing about the 6 core is that when playing a single game like Black Ops or what not you can put the 6 core in "turbo mode" which shuts down 3 cores and cranks up the remaining 3 to be much faster so this is a win/win...

They ended up giving a holiday special on the 2GB GTX460 making it cheaper than the HD6850 let alone the HD6870. Most of our WoW clients are on low settings & LAX's ISBoxer wonderfully limits the FPS speed of the background WoW clients such that I am more worried about total RAM than pure GPU speed (and these GPUs are all very close in power). I ended up thinking that while maybe there ins't a big bottleneck between vRAM & shared RAM, more RAM is more RAM and the performance of the graphics cards are all similar and went with the 2GB special sale. This should put me at 10BG of total RAM for now and with an SSD dedicated for WoW I hope we are flying. I plan to keep the windows SWAP file on the disk for now to see if IO is spiking between 5 or 10 clients I will report back if I can dedicate the time to test/analyze...


Since you all were so great I figured you deserved to know what I ended up getting which was the following:

http://www.ibuypower.com/Store/espec.aspx?eid=123417

I am tempted to get myself the exact same build except with the 1GB HD6870 to compare the differences but know that I prefer to play on my laptop and be mobile. I already have somewhat decent performance on my laptop (dual core ASUS with 1GB vRAM & 4GB RAM) but am a little hampered by slow laptop hard drive IO & vista 32bit and also bought my self the following Christmas present to upgrade my laptop:

- SSD 240G|OCZ OCZSSD2-2VTXE240G R
- WIN PRO 7 64-BT ENG 1PK DSP OEI DVD

Thanks again everyone. These forums have been great and I always appreciate all the help (Ualaa was extremely helpful when I first came here and he, among other, made me really trust & be grateful for this site).

I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas !!!

[Duane]

Excuse my ignorance but when we talk video card GPUs are we referencing core clock, effective memory clock or something else?

[nodoze]

Excuse my ignorance but when we talk video card GPUs are we referencing core clock, effective memory clock or something else?

Duane, I am also no expert but when I say GPU I am basically referring to the "overall power or speed" of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) on the Graphics card which I believe consists of multiple clocks & speeds, cores, specialty circuits (shaders, aliasers, etc), etc... A graphic card's GPU is different from graphics card's resident Video RAM (vRAM) which the graphic card's GPU has local bus access to without having to go to an external bus to access additional memory (shared system RAM or some kind of "disk" SWAP space/virtual file)...

My references/questions in this thread were very general on "power" & "size" which are only generic "layman" references to the detailed specs the cards GPU and memory have... Not to complicate things, but just like GPUS, vRAM also have specs in addition to size (1GB, 2GB, etc) like speed (DDR1-5) & clocks & then there is the local bus that connects the GPU to the memory as well as the bus the graphic's card used to connect to the computer to consider.... It can get pretty complicated pretty quickly and the bottom line is that all of that technical stuff can be irrelevant if it doesn't perform well in the real world which is why people have created benchmarks to try to test/simulate real-world use and publish reviews for us non-specialists...

Sorry if what I said above isn't helpful or make much sense... For more info I recommend the following site for a good overview / starters and it has nice links to more detailed sites:

http://www.hardware-revolution.com/b...november-2010/

http://www.hardware-revolution.com/r...nstream-kings/

For a good, but more technical read, I found the following review pretty well written for a layman:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon...50-6870-review

As always, Guru3D's full articles are great but in particular I would point you to the following pages:

- Guru3d's page 2 & page 21 gives you some idea of the GPU & vRAM specs & an sample of overclocking...
- pages 3 & 13-22 gives you an idea of some of the benchmarking...
- page 10 gives you good info on power consumption...
- page 11 covers comparative heat & sound...
- page 23 is the summary which I suspect many people just skip to...

There are also sites which directly compare detailed stats & benchmarks of card A to card B but I don't have the URLs for those handy.... If you are still wanting more info after reading the above links let me know and I can likely re-find them again...

[Duane]

Duane, I am also no expert but when I say GPU I am basically referring to the "overall power or speed" of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) on the Graphics card which I believe consists of multiple clocks & speeds, cores, specialty circuits (shaders, aliasers, etc), etc... A graphic card's GPU is different from graphics card's resident Video RAM (vRAM) which the graphic card's GPU has local bus access to without having to go to an external bus to access additional memory (shared system RAM or some kind of "disk" SWAP space/virtual file)...

My references/questions in this thread were very general on "power" & "size" which are only generic "layman" references to the detailed specs the cards GPU and memory have... Not to complicate things, but just like GPUS, vRAM also have specs in addition to size (1GB, 2GB, etc) like speed (DDR1-5) & clocks & then there is the local bus that connects the GPU to the memory as well as the bus the graphic's card used to connect to the computer to consider.... It can get pretty complicated pretty quickly and the bottom line is that all of that technical stuff can be irrelevant if it doesn't perform well in the real world which is why people have created benchmarks to try to test/simulate real-world use and publish reviews for us non-specialists...

Sorry if what I said above isn't helpful or make much sense... For more info I recommend the following site for a good overview / starters and it has nice links to more detailed sites:

http://www.hardware-revolution.com/b...november-2010/

http://www.hardware-revolution.com/r...nstream-kings/

For a good, but more technical read, I found the following review pretty well written for a layman:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon...50-6870-review

As always, Guru3D's full articles are great but in particular I would point you to the following pages:

- Guru3d's page 2 & page 21 gives you some idea of the GPU & vRAM specs & an sample of overclocking...
- pages 3 & 13-22 gives you an idea of some of the benchmarking...
- page 10 gives you good info on power consumption...
- page 11 covers comparative heat & sound...
- page 23 is the summary which I suspect many people just skip to...

There are also sites which directly compare detailed stats & benchmarks of card A to card B but I don't have the URLs for those handy.... If you are still wanting more info after reading the above links let me know and I can likely re-find them again...

Thanks for the information. I'm still going to have to spend more time looking at things before I fully understand it though.