video memory savings! -- must read for 1gb card users.

[awesomepossum]

so i have my 2x ati 5850 1gb's.. good enough to tackle anything in 1080p on max settings with none to low aa settings, right? well exept for bf3 of course... bf3 is probly the only game out at the moment that with the game on max settings + aa, pretty much demands up to 2gb of vram depending on what lvl of aa, or skryime with allot of mods... anyway!

so i couldent use ultra settings and no aa, it would downspike. so i settled for all ultra but textures on high and 2x msaa for awhile... but the detail with textures from high->ultra.. is just such a visual difference its upsetting not to be able to run it on these 2 (still high end) cards.. so i did a little vram snooping and found some things out...

my system was using anywhere from 200-400 vram just sitting on my desktop, WTF?!

first windows aero, this crap uses 160mb of vram constant. (insane right?)... turn it off!

suprising, FIREFOX. yea.. the webbrowser.. this thing uses 100-200mb of vram if u have it running. i wish i was kidding, add that to its actual memory usage and thats 200-300mb of ram for firefox total. windows xp dosent even use that much. internet exploer uses about 10-20, and the winner, now my default browser is google chrome, it only uses 0-1mb of vram. YAY.

and last, gpu scaling.. i have 2 monitors, and both had gpu scaling checked in my catalyst settings, i turned it off for my second monitor and freed up another 20mb or so of vram, turning it off for my main gave no effect.

so now my system sits at 18mb of vram usage at desktop in windows 7 64bit. :)

bf3, now with all settings on ultra (no msaa, but fxaa on high) reports 1800-1950's of vram usage and no more fps drop spikes so a nice stable 60fps on vsync :)

not many other games out there with such memory usage on a single display, i think skryim with allot of mods can push pretty high also... ive heard with enough graphics packs it can hit near 3gb of vram usage...

anyway i am happy with the trade of bf3 textures from high->ultra and the loss of 2xmsaa...

still can belive firefox was using 100-200mb of vram.. wtf lol.

[_I_]

firefox uses gpu rendering, easy enough to disable
http://www.askvg.com/how-to-disable-hardware-acceleration-gpu-rendering-in-mozilla-firefox-4-0-to-fix-font-problem/
ie only uses it for flash and other media

and some games will automatically disable aero

[awesomepossum]

İlk olarak _I_ tarafından gönderildi:

firefox uses gpu rendering, easy enough to disable
http://www.askvg.com/how-to-disable-hardware-acceleration-gpu-rendering-in-mozilla-firefox-4-0-to-fix-font-problem/
ie only uses it for flash and other media

derp, thx, i never noticed that button :P dropped firefox down to 0-1 vram usage.. lol :)