Different Question: 2GB GTX 460, or 1GB GTX 560 Ti?

[Grail]

I understand the 560 is thought to be on average 25-30% faster, but what if I want to avoid spending more than 250? For our purposes, would the speed or the memory be of advantage. This question is for a single card solution for five-boxing with a good quad core and Ultra settings are nice but not necessary on the main. Medium settings the rest of the way with capped fps on the help.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or input.

-Grail

[Sajuuk]

Either will be fine, although I bet Sam Deathwalker will say MOAR VRAM.

Wow is old, go with what you want.

[Bollwerk]

1GB of video ram is more than enough for WoW. Go with the 560. 2GB only begins to make a difference at 2560x1600 with extremely high resolution textures.

[Sam DeathWalker]

As its for 5 boxing I say MORE VRAM!!!!

I was not aware you get get a 460 with 2G, guess you can humm ...

http://www.overclock.net/nvidia/8016...ream-card.html


You have to add all 5 clients resolutions to get "effective resolutions" if you use IsBoxer and full rendering on all slaves for fast swaping. So what you render may very well be way more then your monitors native resolution.

[Bollwerk]

Unless I'm misunderstanding the way things work, if all 5 toons are in the same location, then the textures should only need to be loaded once in vram.

Surround gaming is definitely a different story though. In those cases, you need to add up the resolution of all the monitors to get your effective resolution, as you said.

For us multiboxers, we are far more limited by CPU and GPU horsepower than VRAM.

I wonder if there is a tool out there to measure VRAM usage...
Edit - Turns out GPU-Z can measure VRAM usage for Nvidia cards, but not ATI. Something about sensors.

P.S. Using AA will also increase VRAM usage.

[daanji]

I recently upgraded to a nvidia 560 ti. When I x5 box at good settings, gpu-z will measure about 900/1024 MB used with the gpu almost maxed out.. I have not tried it at higher settings.

[Sajuuk]

As its for 5 boxing I say MORE VRAM!!!!

I was not aware you get get a 460 with 2G, guess you can humm ...

http://www.overclock.net/nvidia/8016...ream-card.html


You have to add all 5 clients resolutions to get "effective resolutions" if you use IsBoxer and full rendering on all slaves for fast swaping. So what you render may very well be way more then your monitors native resolution.

Told you so. And while more VRAM certainly won't hinder performance, only having 1GB won't hurt it, as many of us have been running 1GB

Unless I'm misunderstanding the way things work, if all 5 toons are in the same location, then the textures should only need to be loaded once in vram.

Surround gaming is definitely a different story though. In those cases, you need to add up the resolution of all the monitors to get your effective resolution, as you said.

For us multiboxers, we are far more limited by CPU and GPU horsepower than VRAM.

I wonder if there is a tool out there to measure VRAM usage...
Edit - Turns out GPU-Z can measure VRAM usage for Nvidia cards, but not ATI. Something about sensors.

P.S. Using AA will also increase VRAM usage.

We generally don't use AA when multiboxing to increase performance. Far as how many times things are loaded in VRAM, I am unsure. That would be handled on the code side of things, at least I think.

[Sam DeathWalker]

if all 5 toons are in the same location, then the textures should only need to be loaded once in vram.

Ya if the code was written with multiboxers in mind .... why would would that be the case?

The concept that one client knows about what other clients need or have in ram is just hopeing for way to much.

MAYBE windows might look into system ram to see if data is there before going to the hard drive for it but I really doubt that one client looks into another clients memory space to see if the other client has data it needs ......

I am not even sure applications under windows can share memory space. Microsoft word looking into Photoshop memory space to see if it has data it needs ....



I think that all would agree the IF data in vram is not shared at all and each client is given its own exclusive chunk of vram then with 5 clients and 1G you have like 200M of Vram per client. Clearly you would want more VRAM if that is the case.

[Sajuuk]

I will agree that more is generally better, but you shouldn't necessarily run out and buy something BECAUSE it has more RAM. Go with whatever is cheaper.

[Bollwerk]

@Sam - I was talking more about how DirectX works and not WoW. It seems logical to me that if DirectX is told to load a texture, it might check to see if it's already in VRAM before it goes looking for it. This seems like it wouldn't matter if you are boxing or not. But I don't know if the graphics for each instance of WoW takes up separate space in VRAM or if it's all in one giant pool.

The only way to know for sure is to use a tool like GPU-Z to test on an Nvidia card. Since I have one, I'll try to test this myself sometime.