Vram

[Mike Wazowski]

I understand that if you have like 3 gb of vram and u set all of ur settings in game to ultra the graphics will be buggy, but if you lower down your setting so that the vram limit isn't crossed ananymore, are your graphics not going to be bugg. Anymore? OR is it like, i crossed the limit, now i can't play normal anymore.

And i mean like if you go to something like 3120 mb when your vram is only 3 gb

[tacoshy]

Originally posted by KQLY:

I understand that if you have like 3 gb of vram and u set all of ur settings in game to ultra the graphics will be buggy, but if you lower down your setting so that the vram limit isn't crossed ananymore, are your graphics not going to be bugg. Anymore? OR is it like, i crossed the limit, now i can't play normal anymore.

first you need to know what RAM is for at all. It stores data for faster acess for a processor. For the CPu it is called DRAM, for the GPU VRAM. Basically both are the same. They are volatile memory. Means they can store data with electricty but when electricty is cut, all data on the memory is lost. That is the down-side of RAM/VRAM; while SSDs/HDDs can store their data for long periods, they are also much slower.

In the RAM or VRAM data will be stored that the processor (in your case the VRAM for the GPU) needs often so that the processor doesnt need to wait to recieve the data from a slow drive. What are those data?

that can either be textures like a wooden wall for a wooden cabine. Means if you have to less VRAM in this scenario the textures are loaded to slow. Meaning you'll see a purple house for example and after a while the texture plops up and you see an actually wodden cabine where you befor just saw the form of the cabine completly in purple.

On the other hand it could be core data. means the GPU doesnt know in a 3D world, how the 3D world should look like at all. In case of a city it renders the houses close to you but cant render the houses in the distance as the GPU doesnt know what it should look like. So after a while the GPU will know and the hosues in the distance going to plop on your screen. In the same scenario it also can mean that the GPU tries to render the complete frame directly but needs way longer to render it which will causing low fps or mostly a high fps drop.

SO VRAM is mostly important for correct textures, render distance and maintaing FPS. They never are important to achieve high fps.



So what will happen if you have to less VRAM, first the RAM going to store the Data for the GPU and cover up for it. Problem is, that even DDR4 is slower then GDDR3 and therfor cant competly cover up for it. Also that would be missing RAM for the CPU which can slow (bottleneck) the CPU and in most cases the RAM will dump the GPu informations to not sacrafice the CPu performance. It however smoothen out the effect mentioned above.

Next level is the laoding of the drive the game is installed on in which case you end up on the scenarios explained above.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

One could say that lack of VRAM doesn't hurt; but in some ways (if it occurs) can if the system is forced to then use CPU DRAM; which also was explained by Tacoshy the pros & cons of all of that.

So to say "wont effect FPS by going with a certain VRAM size" this can be correct, or incorrect; depending on what further details you wish to go into.

If DRAM gets hogged up to the point where the CPU is suffocating and waiting, that surely can hurt game performance; i.e. FPS or load-times, etc. Depends on the actual scenario at play.

Having say a GTX 1060 3GB however; well you could simply just adjust the visual settings; which then in-turn can dictate which Texture sizes and such are then used; so that you can help keep that GPU from ever needing more than 3GB VRAM to do those tasks properly for said Game. 3GB cuts things close for some games, but it's still not unrealistic size of VRAM for 1920x1080

[Carlsberg]

Another reason for not exceeding vram is delay to screen output. Windows will throw an exception error if the output to screen is delayed too long and will terminate the gpu's current task.

[[☥] - CJ -]

If you run into an instance where you are using more VRAM than the GPU has it'll start coming out of your Physical RAM

This is whats known as Shared Memory

You can find out if this is happening to you by going to the Task Manager under Performance/GPU.

As Physical RAM is slightly slower than VRAM there will be a SLIGHT performance hit, but it shouldnt be bad as long as you have enough RAM.

So its always best to have a GPU with a VRAM amount that is ideal, such as 4GB or higher as many games are capable of using more than 2GB at decent settings.

In the case of Shared Memory, its always best to have AT LEAST 8GB RAM but 16GB is now the preferred amount.

All of this varies though depending on the game and graphic settings.
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Its possible for a game to max out your RAM and the amount of Shared Memory being used in an 8GB setting, so thats where 16GB would come in handy.

Ive actually had this happen in a game before with 8GB RAM and a 2GB VRAM GPU.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Originally posted by ☥ - CJ -:

If you run into an instance where you are using more VRAM than the GPU has it'll start coming out of your Physical RAM

This is whats known as Shared Memory

You can find out if this is happening to you by going to the Task Manager under Performance/GPU.

Yes under Windows 10; but for real, just have MSI Afterburner, always

[Mike Wazowski]

Thank you all for the answers i appreciate it <3 now i know it