» Sun May 13, 2012 8:10 pm Depending on what you're using the PC for, you can definitely have too much RAM. Not in a bad way, but in a "what's the point?" way...
It's probably supposed to use all of the VRAM, to make the game run smoother.
It's probably supposed to use all of the VRAM, to make the game run smoother.
no, Even in the senarios where your more than exceeding the necessary amout consumed..... lets say runnig 8gb of ram but not "CURRENTLY" using anything more than 3gb maybe 5gb at any given time.... you still cannot ever have enough. While it's plenty for the time being, when it comes to a few years passing, specially with things finally starting to migrate to 64bit now/soonish.... the 32bit limits are no longer going to hold back creative artists and graphic designers from having to keep everything "within" the limits currently imposed.
No it's not "supposed" to use all the vram, it uses whatever it can when it needs to, and offloads any excess to physical ram "if" it can do it. Add to that a third frame buffer, some FSAA and so forth.. and your vram will have been exhausted before starting to play with graphic settings.
Is it silly for manufacturers to install lets say 2gb of DDR3 vram on a HD5450 ATI card or a Nvidia 520 video card? Yes most definitely, not only is the DDR3 terrible performance wise for graphics, the GPU is just piss poor to begin with. Modern high end GPUS and even decent midrange ones with excessive amounts of vram are able to retain stable and playable frame rates, when the gpu is waiting on the vram/physical ram to swap textures and data around, what's the point? The moment you exceed the vram's capacity, the gpu is going to be waiting unless it's already overburdened.
Not really true. You hit a point at which the GPU is maxed out and more video RAM would do no good at all. It really depends on how much data the GPU can process. Graphics card manufacturers typically sell midrange - low-end enthusiast cards with more video RAM than they need toward the middle-end of the GPU's life cycle to squeeze more money out of the market. In almost all cases the performance gain doesn't justify the price increase over the reference VRAM configuration. I'm not saying that having plenty of VRAM isn't good, but once the GPU (or even the PCI-E bus) becomes the bottleneck it's pointless to add more. That doesn't stop the card manufacturers, though. 
Read the above, VRAM is in fact very cheap.... NOT talking DDR3 for vram.. but GDDR5 currently.. there is very little increase in video card price jumping from a 1gb to 2gb card.... even today a HD6790/HD5770 card with 1gb is pumping out very great frame rates, and if it had 2gb of vram would perform even better in skyrim with high resolution textures just fine, but unfortunately it can't due to the lack of vram on it. It would sure improve the frame rate. I can confirm this with previous generation knowledge. If a senario comes about typically where vram is in short supply, things improve considerably when more of it is made available Provided the gpu is fully capable of it.
Surfice it to say, with the increase in resolution and FSAA being applied today.... vram is huge demand, Those running eyefinity setups just with skyrim's vanilla typically uses double to triple the amount of vram than standard 1080p single displays.. simply due to the extra amount of pixels to render out. Gpus fully capable of doing it, but with those riding the vram limits already..... doesn't leave much room for extra textures due to already filling up the vram.
with 3gb cards... like i said previously in another post.... i can have the vram on that card totally exhausted before getting even into the higher FSAA settings and would be able to retain a higher frame rate if it wasn't for the fact that i ran out of vram.
