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

[nodoze]

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

Understood. I have been playing computer games & working with software & building machines for around 30 years & I always look for help & peer review... Don't feel bad as I don't claim to fully understand everything even after a formal Computer Science degree with a Management Information Systems (MIS) Masters & I work with large Enterprise Resource Planning systems with huge Blade/SANs 24x7 & game while waiting for issues to arise...

That is what focused reviewers with ratings are for...

There are plenty of good info out there on how given Graphic Cards perform for current "single box" games but what makes sense for the best Frames per Second for the current First Person Shooter flavor of the day doesn't necessarily help me...

Not that much info out there on maximizing systems for multi-boxing which is why dual-boxing & ISboxer is the place to be for these types of questions.

In the end, with the price breaks, I think I kinda got the best of both worlds (pretty close/equivalent GPU with double the RAM)...

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Keep in mind how the individual components affect the video card's price/performance ranges:

Model:

Base GPU = this is the "generation" if you will of the GPU; i.e.: 9xxx, 8xxx, GT2xx, GT4xx, etc.
VRAM size = how much

Variant:

GPU capabilities = how many shaders, etc. are enabled/supported on this variant of the base GPU
GPU clock = aka core clock; how fast the GPU runs
GPU<-->VRAM bus width = 64bit, 128bit, 256bit, etc.
VRAM clock = how fast the VRAM speed is set

The model of the video cards determines the base feature support. The variant determines what performance class the video card falls into.

So basically, find a card that supports the features you want (DX10? DX11?) and then look at the cheapest variant that does what you want for your application.

In my experience, the order of importance for determining performance within a given model's variants is roughly:

• GPU<-->VRAM bus width
• GPU clock
• TIE: GPU shaders/texelgens OR VRAM clock, depending on how "purty" your game is.
• VRAM size

Now, these things aren't linear and depending on your specific application, the order of the bottom 2/3 might change.

To give you an example, an 8800GT is still faster FPS in games than a 9600GT or a GT240, though it may not support certain advanced effects in some games if the game requires DX10/11 for those effects.

In the end, it's really up to you to do some intelligent research and find out what your primary needs are. If you can't figure it out, then you're going to either have to abuse store return policies to test them out and find the one that fits your games, or throw money at the highest-end card you can afford.

[Buetzel]

while writhing a reply in http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=33260 , i remembered this discussion was going on here.

do we have someone here on the forum who has definitely too much money and who could (and would) test this?

as far as i see it, there would be a simple (yet expensive) way to test this.
one would need a nvidia 460 with 1gb ram, one nvidia 460 with 2gb ram and one amd 6870 (better performance as far as some benchmarks from testing sites go).

my guess to the topic would be, that indeed 2gb should be a remarkable improvement to 1gb, IF (that's a BIG if) wow really utilizes it.

my reasoning: most sites indeed test graphics cards only for one monitor and more important only for one game instance. so for example tomshardware has tested the 460 2gb as a bit slower performance wise as the 460 1gb model and of course both models slower as the 6870. i think the 2gb model of the same card is a little slower because the bigger memory has to be managed. and if a game or benchmark doesn't utilize the memory of that size, only this management overhead will be noted.

now... when we use 5 instances of a game, the textureloading is rather important for performance (especially in big hubs like lagaran was in wrath - and i suppose it was loadaran, not lagaran, as i suspect the low performance in the city to stem from a lot of texture loading all the time, either from hdd/sdd or from system ram, which still is slower as videoram and needs computing power to be moved from system ram to video ram, not from lags).
this probably is also the case in bigger raids and battlegrounds. the bigger the number of players, the more textures have to be loaded for the characters.

as someone mentioned, i also don't believe that wow is multiboxing optimized in that it can use a texture loaded for one instance on another instance of wow. so all textures have to be loaded 5 times to the graphics card's video ram. also - this reduces the video ram to 200mb per instance, which is clearly a lot less than the whole 1gb of a standard card these days.

as i said earlier - wow has to really utilize the vram still. and the reason for me posting now was actually this point. i remember an addon which i used in early wrath, which dynamically adjusted graphics details and which had also a way to tell wow how much video memory it should be using for textures.
anyone here who remembers that one or knows what i'm even talking about? vital for really testing the performance of a graphics card with more vram would be to adjust wow, so it uses the bigger vram. if wow is set to only use ... for example 64mb vram for textures, then of course the card with a faster gpu would flat out win and card with the same gpu but bigger vram would show no improvement.
i will definitely look for the settings, that addon changed. hopefully i find that stuff again...

edit2: found it, i think. http://www.wowpedia.org/CVar_gxTextureCacheSize
notably: only works with dx9 api... so perhaps... not too much help with the gpu's we're discussing... at least not if one wants to use the added benefits of dx11 in cataclysm.

edit3: also: http://www.wowpedia.org/CVar_textureCacheSize
32mb or 64mb for textures in the system ram? if that's the case, then of course the graphics card has to load textures from a drive and graphics performance does not benefit from system ram that much. also explains drive activity, which sam pointed at.


on the other hand: of course also more graphics effects like spells and stuff need more performance. so for example in raids/battlegrounds performance is also heavily influenced by the power of the gpu.

so imo the questions have to be:
- is it (still?) possible to adjust wow, so it uses the given vram effectively?
- is there a performance gain with more vram and same gpu?
- if yes, is this performance gain bigger than the performance gain of a better gpu (possibly only slightly better gpu, when using the gpu's i mentioned)

edit: just got another thought: of course the bigger vram would make itself noted only after some time playing. if you first log in to dalaran, still the textures have to be loaded from hdd/ssd. but maybe after cycling once around dalaran, all textures should be loaded and THEN performance should be better than with less vram. so... it won't be a performance gain which is always and instantly noticeable, thus perhaps pushing the benefits of a more powerful gpu a bit more.

@sam: perhaps lax is right after all. at least when wow doesn't use more than 1gb vram while running 5 instances.


i for one am also really curious about this, as i need a new graphics card in the near future (geforce 8800 gts 512 doesn't cut it anymore. me wants myself some dx11 eyecandy!). so if anyone would sacrifice the money (or maybe more like "if someone already has this cards lying around or uses them for different machines or something"), i'd definitely like to hear about it.


and lastly - i hope my long sentences with too many commas and brackets don't cause you headache. i know it does to me. sorry for that.

[Sam DeathWalker]

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...48996420&sid=1

If it's a 2 GB card, each core has 1 GB to itself and you should maybe give it something under that, like 800 if you're doing nothing else on the card. If you multitask and you're on Vista or 7, it's best to use a lower number or let the game manage it on its own. Keep in mind that gxTextureCacheSize only functions in d3d9ex mode.


Well this is most interesting to be sure.

WoW only using 32/64MB per client of system ram for textures in default.

But you can set it at much higher, but you have to watch the 2G limit as your game will lock up if you run out of memory.




Ok here we are the 3rd post in this thread is gold:

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=182340



Posted 07 October 2010 - 01:45 AM
Obscene CPU overclocking is technically one way to get smooth performance in Dalaran, but it's hardly worth looking until optimizing game behavior, which is far more reliable and significantly less risky, no longer yields measurable gains. The distance between those points can greatly minimized with a few simple adjustments, though.

First thing, however, is to accept the degree of World of Warcraft's CPU limitation. Achieving 60 constant frames per second while in the middle of a populated Dalaran is very difficult because of the hundreds of client-server interactions occurring between all of the players. My personal frame rates will dip to about 50 FPS at high-traffic times, but outside of Dalaran and chaotic Wintergrasp fights, rarely is visual performance ever an issue.

A quick look-up chart for the processAffinityMask CVar in the Config.WTF would look something like the below graphic, which has eight common configurations. Adjust accordingly by the core binary values at the foot of the stack if you don't feel your ideal circumstance is listed. Keep in mind that, with the exception of manual core allocation, the process affinity mask variable is no longer required to be present or explicitly defined (automatic detection/allocation is "0" which runs the application across all available logical cores) within Config.WTF. Being a 32-bit application, the processAffinityMask CVar is only capable of addressing 32 cores with a maximum CVar value of "4294967295."


Changing the gxTextureCacheSize variable is less straightforward because of the numerous factors that affect graphics memory consumption, like anti-aliasing, shadow volume precision, resolution, and the buffering model. Graphics cards like the GTX 480 are powerful enough to drive the largest monitors without the possible likelihood of supersaturating its memory capacity, so you could set your CVar to match your VRAM size directly. As pointed out above, however, there is still more to do regarding your performance overall.

For in-game settings, the biggest concern lies in shadow quality. There are six levels of detail, but only a few need to be kept in mind. The first level draws only the traditional shadow blobs for on-screen actors (players, NPCs, creatures, etc.) with baked (pre-generated) shadows for world geometry. The second level draws geometry- and lighting-accurate shadows, but only for your character and those within very close proximity; baked world shadows are still used. The third, fourth, and fifth levels use dynamic shadows for world geometry as well as actors, with varying level of detail ranges for both (dropping actor shadows before world,) increasing in range and resolution as the slider is pushed farther to the right. At the sixth level, the maximum extrusion range and precision are used for both subsets, and shadows may overlap. As you can probably tell, the maximum value for this will be exceptionally demanding and should be avoided; at the very most, use the second-highest setting.

A few other pointers would be to never use anything beyond 4x in-game multisampling, enable vertical synchronization and triple buffering, and never run in Windowed mode. These all contribute to your performance in their own fairly appreciable ways.

As for NVCP settings, try the following.
Quote
Ambient Occlusion: (Off)
Anisotropic Filtering: (Application-controlled)
Antialiasing - Gamma Correction: (On)
Antialiasing - Mode: (Application-controlled)
Antialiasing - Setting: (Application-controlled)
Antialiasing - Transparency: 2x (Supersample)
CUDA - GPU’s: (All)
Extension limit: (Off)
Maximum Pre-rendered Frames: (0)
Multi-display/mixed - GPU acceleration: (Single display performance mode)
Power management mode: (Adaptive)
SLI rendering mode: (Single-GPU)
Texture Filtering - Anisotropic sample optimization: (On)
Texture Filtering - Negative LOD bias: (Allow)
Texture Filtering - Quality: (Quality)
Texture Filtering - Trilinear Optimization: (On)
Threaded Optimization: (Auto)
Triple Buffering: (Off)
Vertical Sync: (Use the 3D application setting)


That post is so good I'm going to put it up on my forum, so it dosn't get lost.



IsBoxer wants windowed mode though.

[Buetzel]

and possibly "multi-display/mixed - gpu acceleration" should be set to multi display performance mode when using more than one monitor.
and do note one of the later posts of the second thread you linked says, that with 4.0 patch d3d9ex is renamed to d3d9, so gxApi should not be set to d3d9ex anymore.

[Diablostar]

I'm still a bit confused. So which GPU is the best value for money to run 5 WoWs on one PC after the recent update? Plan would be to run the main with Ultra setttings and the four other toons on low.

[Igg]

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?

Let me help you out here.
I have both of those cards
If I were you, I'd go with the 6870, atm, 4 clients DO NOT ultize over 1gb of ram, but it does max out on the GPU.

Here is my 4 clients on my secondary screen flying over water with 2x AA on, 1920x 1200 resolution.



I have been struggling with figuring out with combo is best in terms of GPU power.

Currently I have 2 ATI 6870, 2 GTX 460 2GB, and I've been playing with various combo.
If I were you, I'd get an ATI 6870 for your five boxing needs.

The rest of my specs are i7 @ 3.6GHZ, 12GB of ram (8~GB used when five boxing),

[nodoze]

U guys are awesome. I really liked reading all of the stats and settings & experiences.

Note that currently I only run semi-high settings on my main character and run the rest on low with low resolutions & restricted frame speeds (thanks to ISBoxer) but would love to have better graphics... Especially on the main client that takes up most of my monitor... At this point I really want to just one one video card with one nice monitor with most of the screen being the main client and the others just being little ones on the same monitor).

Igg, Any idea on 10 clients? Once the new system arrives we will likely start out doing two five-man groups (my 5-man on my laptop & his 5-man on the new Desktop) but I was thinking when only 1 of us is available of doing a full 10 man for the larger raids on the desktop.

If need be, I will plunk another 8GB of RAM into the new machine (all of WoW on SSD with 6 real/full cores & 16 RAM total) and was curious which you thought would be better for a 10-man team on one desktop with one video card:

- 6780 1GB;
- GTX 460 2GB;

[Lax]

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.



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 .....



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!

Textures are usually loaded from disk, into system RAM, and copied into VRAM when they are needed for rendering. A significant portion of the ~500MB of RAM each of my WoW windows use is probably textures.

If the game is constantly loading things from disk, the game could potentially do better prediction of the resources it will need, and load them beforehand. Most of this type of chugging comes from player models, which have a wide range of resources and are relatively difficult to predict, when they haven't already been loaded into system RAM from the disk. It would be much more practical to put all of WoW on a Ramdisk as we've briefly discussed before. I believe this would be some orders of 10 better than adding enough VRAM to make a dent (especially while multiboxing).

[Igg]

U guys are awesome. I really liked reading all of the stats and settings & experiences.

Note that currently I only run semi-high settings on my main character and run the rest on low with low resolutions & restricted frame speeds (thanks to ISBoxer) but would love to have better graphics... Especially on the main client that takes up most of my monitor... At this point I really want to just one one video card with one nice monitor with most of the screen being the main client and the others just being little ones on the same monitor).

Igg, Any idea on 10 clients? Once the new system arrives we will likely start out doing two five-man groups (my 5-man on my laptop & his 5-man on the new Desktop) but I was thinking when only 1 of us is available of doing a full 10 man for the larger raids on the desktop.

If need be, I will plunk another 8GB of RAM into the new machine (all of WoW on SSD with 6 real/full cores & 16 RAM total) and was curious which you thought would be better for a 10-man team on one desktop with one video card:

- 6780 1GB;
- GTX 460 2GB;

I think when you're doing 10 Client, you're better off going with 2 video cards and splitting the loads that way. Five clients already max out one GTX460 GPU let alone 10
I also run my 5 clients on SSD (1st gen X25 in raid 0).