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Battlefield 4 VRAM Wall Performance Drop?

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  • Performance
  • Battlefield
  • Graphics
Last response: in Graphics & Displays
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November 7, 2013 8:59:52 AM

Hello,

I am running Battlefield 4 on ultra-maxed out @ 1600x900 resolution.

My rig;

3570k @ 4.4 Ghz on air 1.35v
2x4 8GB Kingston HyperX Genesis 1600 cl9 @ 1866 9-10-9-28
2xAsus Gtx 660 DC2(OC) @1175max/6400mem 1.212v
700W 80+ PSU
MSI z77ma-g45 mobo

Situation:

After all the benchmarks I have run on 64man full multiplayer servers the conclusion is:

19 FPS lowest frame rate so far and in most benchmarks it was not lower than 45-50
93 FPS average frame rate, average of all results
203 FPS maximum frame rate, peak of all results

So, obviously the average frame rate indicates to good performance but more often than not I got a stuttering gameplay, not micro-stuttering kind of stuttering but more like laggy kind of stuttering.

Another observation:

I have not seen higher VRAM usage than 1662 VRAM and that was exceptional, mostly VRAM usage seems to be "actually" stuck @ 1532 VRAM.

This makes me think that 192-bit memory is blocking the last 512MB memory and hence the performance is reduced whenever memory is pushed beyond that point hence creating a laggy/stuttering gameplay.

But this is just my idea, what I want to know is what you guys think and if this is actually the case? If so I will actually regret buying the second 660 some weeks ago.

In other games like Crysis 3, Metro LL, Far Cry 3, Battlefield 3, Tomb Raider, Sleeping Dogs, Batman Arkham City, Batman Arkham Origins my setup actually surpasses the performance of a stock Gtx 780, I confirmed this from techspot 1680x1050 benchmarks and other 1600x900 benchmarks I could find online. But again in those games VRAM usage sits at 1400 VRAM and doesn't go much higher than that.

More about : battlefield vram wall performance drop

November 7, 2013 9:10:15 AM

With a 192bits memory controller and 2GB RAM, this means the memory configuration is non-uniform: two channels have 512MB while the third has 1GB. I would not be surprised if drivers tried to avoid using more than 512MB on that 1GB channel to mitigate load imbalance between channels.
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November 7, 2013 9:42:52 AM

So it is true then, this card is actually a 1.5GB effective VRAM card and not a 2Gb card? It is just a marketing gimmick?
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Related resources
November 7, 2013 2:29:10 PM

I wouldn't immediately start by assuming there's something wrong your memory configuration. I would begin by looking at your graphics quality settings and try to pinpoint a culprit, like Ambient Occlusion or Transparency AA. Then there's the fact that if you're online, that's often going to be inconsistent no matter what type of setup you have.
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November 7, 2013 3:44:23 PM

So you are suggesting I should wait for next patches to have some potential issue fixed that may be causing this?

About the settings, doesn't that still mean that after around 1532 MB of VRAM usage my 660s even in SLI setup will start to have terrible performance compared to what they got below that amount?
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November 7, 2013 5:35:52 PM

srhnd said:
About the settings, doesn't that still mean that after around 1532 MB of VRAM usage my 660s even in SLI setup will start to have terrible performance compared to what they got below that amount?

That would depend on how badly the channel with extra RAM gets hit compared to the others. As long as the extra RAM on that channel only gets used for infrequently used textures and buffers, it should be ok but optimizing memory allocation between channels to make that happen could be tricky... so that would be my guess why they might try to use the last 512MB more conservatively.
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November 7, 2013 5:57:33 PM

Crysis 3 is going to hog more VRAM than BF4 (with similar settings) so I'm expecting there is something else going on, hopefully fixed with drivers/patches. It's entirely possible that there is a bias against your architecture on BF4, which developers are known to do, particularly on recent AMD Gaming Evolved titles (Tomb Raider was a good example, and BF4 clearly favors AMD). Basically, there's not much you can do except play around with the graphics settings and wait for patches and more mature drivers. Again, expect performance hiccups when playing on 64 player on-line servers.
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November 7, 2013 6:03:35 PM

BS about the 192 bit crap. on my system running 1080p ultra, i get about 1750mb max vram useage. many people are experiencing stuttering in this game, particularly on multiplayer. use google, there are many fixes. i had stuttering in the beta at first, till i ran the c++ and dx setups from the game folder, then it was ok, 60fps pretty much solid with the odd dip here and there, most likely due do network bandwidth/server issues. havnt tried the full game release yet though, not really interested in playing it.
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November 8, 2013 6:03:57 AM

Ok I don't remember the exact VRAM usage on Crysis 3 at peak so I will check that out when I can.

192 bit crap is unfortunately real although this may not be the issue with BF4.

images.bit-tech.net/content_images/2012/08/nvidia-geforce-gtx-660-ti-2gb-review/zotacgtx660-10b.jpg

the ones below the gpu are the ones that share the same bus width when the 1500mb is surpassed.
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November 8, 2013 7:44:35 AM

I can confirm that BF4 hits a VRAM wall on my 660s.

Quote:
When I set Textures to high the max amount of VRAM usage is 1480-1490, does not push further and I have absolutely no lag, fluid gameplay it is. FPS solid stable @ 58 FPS. (no AA)


Quote:
When I set Textures to ultra the max amount of VRAM usage is 1532-1625, does not push further than that and my gameplay is ruined with FPS drops to 10-17-25 from the max FPS amount I have set as 58. Gameplay is often laggy and stuttering. (no AA)


Can I know assume that I will not be able to play it with my setup at maxed out at ultra?

FYI in beta I could play fluidly and even record a high quality fraps video, my FPS would hover between 50-60, never dropped or stuttered, I had only 1 single GTX 660 back then and my settings were all @ ultra without AA.

So with two 660s in released version I cannot even run it like 1 660 ran it back in beta.

In Crysis 3 VRAM usage gets as high as 1580 ONLY if I run the game with 8xAA max quality AA which I usually don't and even at 4xAA VRAM usage does not go above 1509 which is still fluid experience.
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November 8, 2013 8:39:37 AM

srhnd said:
and even at 4xAA VRAM usage does not go above 1509 which is still fluid experience.

1509MB is 27MB shy of 1536MB where uneven loading on the 1GB channel might start becoming an issue.
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November 8, 2013 9:13:58 AM

I get 98 fps average in 15 minute gameplay of reaching to the VIPs level in single player, stuttering still sometimes occur but is very negligible compared to that in multiplayer. Still the max VRAM usage went up to 1584 MB I assume this is why it occurred. So was it a mistake to buy this card because of its 192 bit limitation then? I guess it is fine until it gets to 1500 MB usage and after that it becomes a low end like card eh? God damn nvidia.
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November 8, 2013 10:06:18 AM

Have you tested on single player?
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November 8, 2013 11:20:24 AM

The last post above yours is me testing the single player.

BTW, I overclocked the memory frequency to 6600Mhz by unlocking the voltage and fixed GPU speed @ 1175Mhz by putting equal values to gpu base and boost clocks. Now at Ultra Textures I see my VRAM usage is max 1522 MB, I have 99.9% no more stuttering. This means it really was the VRAM bottleneck I guess.

I think the fact that with increased frequency it processes textures faster makes it use less VRAM and hence no stuttering. Nevertheless I am disappointed with the solution I settled on by purchasing another 660 instead of selling it and buying a 770 or 760 SLI.

Edit:

48-man FULL server settings all @ Ultra with Weapon DOF off + MSAA OFF
Frames 59422
Time (ms) 477344

Min Max Avg
47 175 124.485

This is actually a pretty good result isn't it? But it was still a bit laggy.

Funny thing is, Vsync or any other FPS limitation mechanisms adds more lag and causes even less fps.
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November 8, 2013 12:12:09 PM

If you are experimenting with VSync, be sure to use Adaptive VSync to avoid those drops in framerate.
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November 8, 2013 12:34:12 PM

No, Vsync is buggy, I limit the FPS by ingame console but that above average was without FPS limit and it even ran and felt better. I guess there is some issue here with FPS drops being related to maybe something else in general. That high of FPS does not really indicate to a VRAM bottleneck does it?

Benchmarking on Sleeping Dogs, Tomb Raider and Splinter Cell Blacklist with this overclock yields me results as good as a reference Titan and 660Ti SLI with reference clocks.

Is there a way to do anything via Nvidia Inspector or something?

guru3d.com/articles_pages/battlefield_4_vga_graphics_performance_benchmark,7.html

Benchmarked the exact same level with exact same settings but at 1600x900

Result: Minimum 79 Average 107 Maximum 136
Frames Time (ms) Min Max Avg
9627 89844 79 136 107.152
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November 8, 2013 2:32:23 PM

need i say again, having 1750mb vram usage on my system, ultra preset 1080p (higher res, so higher vram usage), vsync on, smooth as silk with the odd hitch due to network and i have nearly identical setup. I do sometimes use nvidia inspector batch files to force constant clock, some games (crysis 2/3) boost clock causes the game to crash/freeze, forcing constant clock solved the probblem in that case. although i didnt come across this in bf3/4.
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November 8, 2013 2:45:58 PM

Can you give me some specific and clear instructions on how to modify the driver or gpu bios or whatever to achieve the smooth performance you got? We have near identical setup obviously and it only means I can achieve it as well then.

For example;

Is your processor at stock speed?
Did you overclock your GPUs?
Did you unlock voltage of GPUs?
Did you modify the driver or game settings in any specific way?
What kind of settings you use in Nvidia control panel?


With the voltage unlocked overclocks on mine I get that high average fps in the same level as the benchmark you can see above and it is fine too in single player, on multi it is stuttering.

Edit:

Quote:
The best case scenario is always going to be that the entire 192bit bus is in use by interleaving a memory operation across all 3 controllers, giving the card 144GB/sec of memory bandwidth (192bit * 6GHz / 8). But that can only be done at up to 1.5GB of memory; the final 512MB of memory is attached to a single memory controller. This invokes the worst case scenario, where only 1 64-bit memory controller is in use and thereby reducing memory bandwidth to a much more modest 48GB/sec.


www.anandtech.com/show/6159/the-geforce-gtx-660-ti-revi...
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November 8, 2013 8:28:42 PM

Interesting, didnt know that about the memory bandwidth, i had to look further into it. and found this article:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/876-3/review-nvidia-...
mentions software/drivers would have to be modified to only use the remaining 512mb for infrequent accessed commands. So just a thought, maybe latest game-ready drivers would improve things to utilize memory correctly.
I found that the game was choppy at first. but after installing c++ libraries and dx update from the game folder, it flattened out to just a little bit of stutter here and there. Many people with varying hardware report stuttering in this game particularly multiplayer, and there are many fixes around. I would suggest using driversweeper to remove old drivers, and installing latest ones. All my nvidia settings were on standard, game settings ultra preset 1080p. i didnt have to do any voltage/overclock tweaks.
The thought of this vram thing is kind of bumming me out now, thanks for making me aware of it :p , maybe i should sell my cards and get a 3gb 7970 ghz on clearance.....I would get some free games then too......
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November 8, 2013 9:02:01 PM

I am thinking of selling them either to be honest, I actually bought my second 660 just some weeks ago. I was trying to decide between 770, 760 SLI or 7970/280x and I just bought another 660, bad decision on my part.

I actually think that it is an automatic process that infrequently used bits and bytes are already being pushed to the last 512mb by Nvidia's design somehow but I may be wrong.

I tested a lot, as long as I stay below 1536 VRAM game is so smooth and fps drops are almost non existent.

When I put it all on ultra ans SMAA it foes to 1680 VRAM at max, does not even utilize the rest for me and FPS is all over the place.

Until BF4 this solution was however pretty much viable I guess. I doubt they will reduce the size of the textures in upcoming patches so I am pretty much screwed.
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November 8, 2013 9:34:58 PM

well, all games seem to run well on my near identical setup but i run higher resolution, which should put even more strain on the cards. if you read the tomshardware link posted it shows AA having a significant impact on these cards, i found the ultra preset 4x setting to be fine.
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November 8, 2013 10:23:56 PM

The 3GB GTX 660/660 Ti's don't suffer from the same problem, since the memory control is symmetrical with everything working at full speed.
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November 9, 2013 1:47:26 AM

17seconds said:
The 3GB GTX 660/660 Ti's don't suffer from the same problem, since the memory control is symmetrical with everything working at full speed.


on toms hardware benches it shows that the 3gb model is actually slower than the 2gb model. just that amount of data over 192 bit, doesnt have enough bandwidth even without the 512mb that runs on 64 bit.

"The gap between the 2 and 3 GB versions of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 660 Ti is even larger when we apply 8x MSAA.
Lesson learned: spending extra on 3 GB is pointless when capacity isn't the problem. "

although this is a pretty old article now and things might be more optimized. either that or they had physx on on the nvidia cards and off on the amd cards, as i dont see that kind of performance hit in my system.
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November 9, 2013 4:45:07 AM

Damn Nvidia what can I say, lol. We have near identical setup yes and you say there is no frame drop that ruins the game even when you play it @1080p plus ultra preset and 4xmsaa right? And your VRAM usage reaches 1750MB? I guess the increased VRAM on your side is coming from the resolution difference but I cannot understand why the heck it stutters and drops on my setup so hard. I tried to put back to stock clocks but it did not work. Average FPS rocks the world but who cares about it when the game is ruined.

With the overclock on these I really achieve a performance that surpasses even a reference 780 in many games including AMD titles as well. But in BF4 it is just terrible. I found out that I can play very smoothly without drops when I set Textures to high, everything else to ultra, AA off but this is disappointing considering I was playing it full ultra with one card in beta.

If this issue is really about the card hitting the VRAM limit then I suppose no patch or driver update will fix it.

I think this would also mean that Titan would become slower if it exceeded the 3GB VRAM since it is only 384 bit afterall.

3GB suffer from this even more and starting from a lower VRAM usage probably because more memory is spread over the same bus and hence it starts to be shared even after smallest amount of VRAM.

UPDATE:
After some more researching I decided to test the GPU memory using OCCT. Here is the screen. I am curious about the 12V now. Is this value normal? It is different than what HWinfo shows. I am starting to suspect my PSU now.
http://s8.postimg.org/eifq7uexx/occt.jpg
http://s7.postimg.org/9b79w2j97/hwgh.jpg
http://s23.postimg.org/wcz42okvf/hwvol.jpg
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November 9, 2013 8:58:28 AM

http://i39.tinypic.com/2gsq0cg.jpg

2 760s 4GB hitting 2GB+ at 1440p been as high as 2.5GB no issues

So for those saying you seeing a performance lost im still sitting at 60fps in skyrim ultra settings no mods
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November 9, 2013 9:04:21 AM

determinologyz said:
http://i39.tinypic.com/2gsq0cg.jpg

2 770s 4GB hitting 2GB+ at 1440p been as high as 2.5GB no issues

So for those saying you seeing a performance lost im still sitting at 60fps in skyrim ultra settings no mods


Well that is about 50 MB over the addressed 2GB but I am not sure if this is the same situation. Because in 4 GB 760s' design 4GB might be addressed by 256bit all together. In 660 2gb 192 bit memory is addressed unevenly, so the performance drop might be noticable whereas maybe 4GB 760 performs a little lower than 2GB 760, just a guess.

Talking about this;

www.anandtech.com/show/6159/the-geforce-gtx-660-ti-revi...

Quote:
The best case scenario is always going to be that the entire 192bit bus is in use by interleaving a memory operation across all 3 controllers, giving the card 144GB/sec of memory bandwidth (192bit * 6GHz / 8). But that can only be done at up to 1.5GB of memory; the final 512MB of memory is attached to a single memory controller. This invokes the worst case scenario, where only 1 64-bit memory controller is in use and thereby reducing memory bandwidth to a much more modest 48GB/sec.


Right now I am considering a PSU insufficiency as well don't know how to be sure.
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November 9, 2013 9:10:55 AM

srhnd said:
determinologyz said:
http://i39.tinypic.com/2gsq0cg.jpg

2 770s 4GB hitting 2GB+ at 1440p been as high as 2.5GB no issues

So for those saying you seeing a performance lost im still sitting at 60fps in skyrim ultra settings no mods


Well that is about 50 MB over the addressed 2GB but I am not sure if this is the same situation. Because in 4 GB 760s' design 4GB might be addressed by 256bit all together. In 660 2gb 192 bit memory is addressed unevenly, so the performance drop might be noticable whereas maybe 4GB 760 performs a little lower than 2GB 760, just a guess.

Talking about this;

www.anandtech.com/show/6159/the-geforce-gtx-660-ti-revi...

Quote:
The best case scenario is always going to be that the entire 192bit bus is in use by interleaving a memory operation across all 3 controllers, giving the card 144GB/sec of memory bandwidth (192bit * 6GHz / 8). But that can only be done at up to 1.5GB of memory; the final 512MB of memory is attached to a single memory controller. This invokes the worst case scenario, where only 1 64-bit memory controller is in use and thereby reducing memory bandwidth to a much more modest 48GB/sec.


Right now I am considering a PSU insufficiency as well don't know how to be sure.


Ive been as high as 2.5GB on the 760s and been past 1.5GB on the 660ti still havent seen any performance drop and the 660ti has the 192 memory bus as well..Actually when i had the 660ti i loaded crysis 2 and gotten close to 2GB with no performance drops
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November 9, 2013 9:13:40 AM

No lag or stuttering or drops of any kind right?

Well although it is a fact that memory addressing is unconventional in these 660 and 660ti cards I think it should not have been this much of a big performance hit. I am trying to get a friend test 1080p full ultra 4xmsaa in BF4 to see if his near identical setup will get fps drop or stuttering. If he does not experience that then I think my PSU might be the problem here.
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November 9, 2013 9:18:29 AM

srhnd said:
No lag or stuttering or drops of any kind right?

Well although it is a fact that memory addressing is unconventional in these 660 and 660ti cards I think it should not have been this much of a big performance hit. I am trying to get a friend test 1080p full ultra 4xmsaa in BF4 to see if his near identical setup will get fps drop or stuttering. If he does not experience that then I think my PSU might be the problem here.


Its your setup bro. Ive not a gpu master or anything but ive done my testing and i can assure you that ive not ran into the vram wall. As i said before i had the 660ti at 1080p when i first started gaming and theres a few times i broke 1.5GB or more just to see any performance lost and i was sitting at 60fps at all times Crysis 2 can put you there close to 2GB
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November 9, 2013 9:29:39 AM

you cant pass your video cards vram... the computer will just offload onto the system memory and yes you will get a drop in fps for sure. that said... i find it hard to believe that 1600x900 run into that problem except in ultra modded skyrim. for the other posts... over at that skyrim.nexus forums... pretty much everybody serious about modding skyrim ditched the 2gb all together with about 80% of users taking amd cards because of their 3gb vram and costing much less than the 4gb nvidia cards. lesson in vram even though it was only one game really with the issue at the time. i personally had a 2gb 670 and it ran skyrim fine at 1440p but as soon as i used mods and enbs performance fell right through the floor... yet... here on toms.... most users affirmed that 2gb vram is more than enough for games and the next gen. i got a 7950 and solved all my problems. here we are over a year later and this issue of vram wall is becoming more and more an issue. i had it with my 1.25gb 570 just a few months before battlefield 3 came out and again... everybody and their mother assured that it was more than enough vram... lairs... 3 months later battlefield clearly used much more than 1.25gb vram at 1080p. lessons man... lessons.
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November 9, 2013 9:35:33 AM

Mate the fellow who posted above shows he runs 60fps solid on 2100mb vram usage on skyrim, I get like 90 fps average even in 64 man server as well but the fps is all over the place and it is unplayable. I was thinking it was the VRAM wall I hit but seems to me like maybe something is wrong with my PSU too I wish some knowledgable fellow about PSUs could help out with this.
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November 9, 2013 10:16:50 AM

nikoli707 said:
you cant pass your video cards vram... the computer will just offload onto the system memory and yes you will get a drop in fps for sure. that said... i find it hard to believe that 1600x900 run into that problem except in ultra modded skyrim. for the other posts... over at that skyrim.nexus forums... pretty much everybody serious about modding skyrim ditched the 2gb all together with about 80% of users taking amd cards because of their 3gb vram and costing much less than the 4gb nvidia cards. lesson in vram even though it was only one game really with the issue at the time. i personally had a 2gb 670 and it ran skyrim fine at 1440p but as soon as i used mods and enbs performance fell right through the floor... yet... here on toms.... most users affirmed that 2gb vram is more than enough for games and the next gen. i got a 7950 and solved all my problems. here we are over a year later and this issue of vram wall is becoming more and more an issue. i had it with my 1.25gb 570 just a few months before battlefield 3 came out and again... everybody and their mother assured that it was more than enough vram... lairs... 3 months later battlefield clearly used much more than 1.25gb vram at 1080p. lessons man... lessons.


srhnd said:
Mate the fellow who posted above shows he runs 60fps solid on 2100mb vram usage on skyrim, I get like 90 fps average even in 64 man server as well but the fps is all over the place and it is unplayable. I was thinking it was the VRAM wall I hit but seems to me like maybe something is wrong with my PSU too I wish some knowledgable fellow about PSUs could help out with this.


Yea there has to be a different issue going on and in the picture i was in the town of winterhold close by the college im sure if i would of went to whiterun or roaming around i would of gotten the vram even higher still hitting 60fps
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November 9, 2013 10:19:33 AM

@moderator can we move the topic to PSU section, I am suspicious of a PSU problem.

UPDATE:

I plugged the monitor cable to second (the one below the top card) graphics card after disabling SLI and then I reenabled it. I played a round silky smooth without so much even as 1 single stuttering moment. Crysis 3 felt a lot playable too and was smooth, benchmarks showed good scores but then I launched BF4 again and FPS was all over the floor.

What can this mean?
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November 9, 2013 10:32:03 PM

if its just bf4, then its the game.
But, I have heard, some motherboards, share pcie slot bandwidth with other slots/onboard components. But, im pretty sure its just the game, many people are having problems. maybe join in on one of the many "bf4 stuttering" threads. I thought I would let you know, I just sold my cards (for many other reasons besides this vram thing). Plan on getting another card shortly, probably a 7970 at this stage. So I cant help you with comparing/testing now.
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November 9, 2013 11:56:18 PM

iam2thecrowe said:
if its just bf4, then its the game.
But, I have heard, some motherboards, share pcie slot bandwidth with other slots/onboard components. But, im pretty sure its just the game, many people are having problems. maybe join in on one of the many "bf4 stuttering" threads. I thought I would let you know, I just sold my cards (for many other reasons besides this vram thing). Plan on getting another card shortly, probably a 7970 at this stage. So I cant help you with comparing/testing now.

Moving to the dark side, eh?
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November 10, 2013 6:16:44 AM

I hope you will be satisfied with your purchase. AMD is a bit more heat and power but in the end when I was buying this card people said Nvidia drivers were superior to AMD's drivers, I have yet to see that since the supposedly WHQL driver sucks big time for the game(s) it was prepared for in the first place while I see AMD users doing pretty fine at this point.

MY PCIe slots are gen 3.0 each running 8x/8x in SLI setup, I think this is equal to gen 2.0 running at 16x/16x right?

http://www.cmwgaming.com/topic/2300-battlefield-4-sli-f...
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/618930/battlef...

Going to try out this fix. Linking in case anyone might want to try it.

I will keep it updated.
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November 10, 2013 8:40:13 AM

srhnd said:
I hope you will be satisfied with your purchase. AMD is a bit more heat and power but in the end when I was buying this card people said Nvidia drivers were superior to AMD's drivers, I have yet to see that since the supposedly WHQL driver sucks big time for the game(s) it was prepared for in the first place while I see AMD users doing pretty fine at this point.

MY PCIe slots are gen 3.0 each running 8x/8x in SLI setup, I think this is equal to gen 2.0 running at 16x/16x right?

http://www.cmwgaming.com/topic/2300-battlefield-4-sli-f...
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/618930/battlef...

Going to try out this fix. Linking in case anyone might want to try it.

I will keep it updated.


"I have yet to see that since the supposedly WHQL driver sucks big time for the game(s) it was prepared for in the first place while I see AMD users doing pretty fine at this point."

Seems like your having issues all the way around i also use the WHQL drivers no issues as well
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November 10, 2013 9:43:34 AM

Your cards are 700 series, seems like these drivers were designed mostly basing on the 700 series. Nvidia is infamous for stopping supporting its older generation cards very quickly and forcing us to buy newer generations.

Second of all, you got 2gb vram that is addressed properly by a 256bit bus width. In my case driver support is crucial for managing that last 512 mb issue.


BTW do you have the game installed on SSD? I have a friend who has almost identical setup to mine and he does not use HDDs he only uses SSDs and I asked him to max out the game including AA @1080p. Although his VRAM usage got stuck like mine at 1580 MB he played some time and he said he did not experience any frame drops or stuttering. Which I think indicates to the faster texture load from SSD offsetting the vram issue on these cards.
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November 10, 2013 9:47:35 AM

srhnd said:
Your cards are 700 series, seems like these drivers were designed mostly basing on the 700 series. Nvidia is infamous for stopping to support its older generation cards very quickly and forcing us to buy newer generations.

Second of all, you got 2gb vram that is addressed properly by a 256bit bus width. In my case driver support is crucial for managing that last 512 mb issue.


When i had the 660ti i still had no issues with drivers and did not have issues with as so called 1.5GB vram wall which i was able to pass without any framedropss..Your issues could be somewhere else bro but from gaming on a 660ti i would know for me everything was solid..


Seems to me your stuck on this vram wall thing and i dont know why your having issues with it for what its worth im pretty sure from my experiences i didnt have any issues and my games are loaded on the hdd...Maybe you should check else where on your pc
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November 10, 2013 9:51:30 AM

Yeah but if you gamed on SSD then it could prevent you from having those issues. If you used HDD then is your windows installed on SSDs only? How about the virtual memory/pagefile you got?

As I said my friend has 2500k stock speed +2x660 SLI, windows 8, pretty much same setup and he also has 1080p so more VRAM usage.

He tried ultra preset yesterday and he saw highest VRAM usage at 1580 MB and reported that there has been no lag or frame drop whatsoever.

Only difference is SSD. He has even a lower PSU wattage @ 650Watts and bigger monitor for higher resolution.

I mean what else can it be? My CPU is rock solid, it runs Prime95 for hours without anything.

On my PSU's box it was specifically written that it supported 7870 Crossfire or 660 SLI, I mean specifically these cards were written.

My monitor is even lower resolution, my RAM is good 8 GB.
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November 10, 2013 9:56:42 AM

srhnd said:
Yeah but if you gamed on SSD then it could prevent you from having those issues. If you used HDD then is your windows installed on SSDs only? How about the virtual memory/pagefile you got?

As I said my friend has 2500k stock speed +2x660 SLI, windows 8, pretty much same setup and he also has 1080p so more VRAM usage.

He tried ultra preset yesterday and he saw highest VRAM usage at 1580 MB and reported that there has been no lag or frame drop whatsoever.

Only difference is SSD. He has even a lower PSU wattage @ 650Watts and bigger monitor for higher resolution.

I mean what else can it be? My CPU is rock solid, it runs Prime95 for hours without anything.

On my PSU's box it was specifically written that it supported 7870 Crossfire or 660 SLI, I mean specifically these cards were written.

My monitor is even lower resolution, my RAM is good 8 GB.


Whats up wth you and this vram wall bro?

Im saying that i havent had any issues and i could of installed the games either on a ssd/hdd as well same results and also you wrote

"He tried ultra preset yesterday and he saw highest VRAM usage at 1580 MB and reported that there has been no lag or frame drop whatsoever."

Which tells me theres something else going wrong
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November 10, 2013 10:35:04 AM

He said exactly that. Doesn't it alone indicate to a vram limit to you? Card, even if it can or cannot, does not want to use that last 512MB. I have not seen higher than 1650 or something myself, I am saying what I have seen and he said what he had seen so it is not like I am personally obssessed with the VRAM wall since I would of course not want to have any such thing on the hardware I spent money on. What are you suggesting? I mean I even ran Furmark and Prime95 together along with a 4gb coverage memtest all together for like 1 hour and nothing happened, if it was PSU it would crack so I eliminated that possibility. No game ever even stresses the PC like this anyway.
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November 10, 2013 11:02:53 AM

srhnd said:
He said exactly that. Doesn't it alone indicate to a vram limit to you? Card, even if it can or cannot, does not want to use that last 512MB. I have not seen higher than 1650 or something myself, I am saying what I have seen and he said what he had seen so it is not like I am personally obssessed with the VRAM wall since I would of course not want to have any such thing on the hardware I spent money on. What are you suggesting? I mean I even ran Furmark and Prime95 together along with a 4gb coverage memtest all together for like 1 hour and nothing happened, if it was PSU it would crack so I eliminated that possibility. No game ever even stresses the PC like this anyway.


Hmm only limitation i saw was seeing games could pass the 2GB mark which is why i changed gpus but my 660ti accesed the last 512MB just fine without issues. Its been a back and forth issue with the last 512MB of vram on different websites but i havent seen for it to be true.
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November 10, 2013 11:39:34 AM

Well on my part I have seen it to be true, my friend's max VRAM usage was like that as well. I see it past 1500 only if I force it on an OCCT stress test, have not seen a game using past that point although it technically should be using.
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November 10, 2013 12:31:01 PM

srhnd said:
Well on my part I have seen it to be true, my friend's max VRAM usage was like that as well. I see it past 1500 only if I force it on an OCCT stress test, have not seen a game using past that point although it technically should be using.


Theres a few games that will take it there or pretty close to 2GB easily

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November 10, 2013 12:46:18 PM

Well, BF4 was stated to be one of those games that brings it to 2200MB VRAM at 1080p full ultra. Assuming that my friend ran it 1080p full ultra on his SLI 660 setup and got max 1580MB VRAM usage then I would say there is either a problem with the game's utilization of these GPUs, hence the drivers or architecture support OR with the card's hardware limitation. I hope it is the first one since it can be fixed by patiently waiting. For other I gotta sell my cards as well I hope it is not the case since I got them recently already.

update: maxed out crysis 3 with 8xaa, watched memory with Playclaw+Hwinfo. As soon as the VRAM reached 1504 MB it started to stutter and the max it reached was 1567 and stuttering was existent almost same pattern as in BF4.

What can be the cause of this guys? Is it possible that I somehow damaged my memory chips with overclocking? I ran my memory at 6600mhz and I cannot see the VRAM temps
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November 10, 2013 1:15:08 PM

srhnd, i know this point is not that good but thought it might help. You didnt compare your OS with the iam2thecrowe, i heard that windows 8 is running this game more smoothly than windows 7 http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/forum/threadview/2... . Some people are complaining from same prob (same specs with decreased performance cause of OS). I didnt read your OS through what i've read in the thread, so if you have windows 7 maybe this is your problem.
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November 10, 2013 1:31:20 PM

My message was somehow weirdly changed here lol. I was saying I had it on windows 8 and thanked you for your reply.

update: maxed out crysis 3 with 8xaa, watched memory with Playclaw+Hwinfo. As soon as the VRAM reached 1504 MB it started to stutter and the max it reached was 1609 and stuttering was existent almost same pattern as in BF4.

What can be the cause of this guys? Is it possible that I somehow damaged my memory chips with overclocking? I ran my memory at 6600mhz and I cannot see the VRAM temps

Crysis 3 @Very High +8xMSAA 1600x900 noVsync
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Best solution

November 10, 2013 1:42:34 PM

Oh sorry this didnt help. Personally, i would wait for some drivers to show up maybe because your current setup can easily outperform the r9 280x easily in most games (that support sli). However, if bf is your life and you are strictly addicted to it, then why not getting the 280x specially with the mantle drivers coming up to relieve your cpu and maybe improve performance. Finally, i dont recommend doing this now, as your 1.5 gb of vram usage seems normal instead of being a bottleneck in the bus width of the 660s check this out http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/battlefield_4_vga_... the game @ ultra and 4xmsaa ( i dont know what AA setting are you using), i think that at your res (no offense i personally game at 1600x1200), the vram will be the last thing a person should worry about or think its bottlenecking the gpu performance.
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