graphics memory my bottleneck?

slate0

Distinguished
Jun 5, 2013
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Hello,

I have a geforce gtx 680, vanilla bought around the time of release.
I don't game a ton, but I haven't been particularly impressed by the performance I'm getting out of Starcraft, Battlefield 4, or Bioshock Infinite. None of them run silky smooth unless I turn off or down many of the features.
I've got an intel i7-4770k overclocked to 4GHz and 16MB of RAM.
My Monitor is a Delll U3011, so it's got a resolution of 2560x1600.

I'm wondering if the 2GB of ram on my video card may be a major bottleneck, in which case the performance bump of going to a 780 (not the Ti) would be more significant.

This thread makes it sound like at least one person thinks that the extra GB would be a big deal for this high resolution, but it is kind of left dangling
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1936993/single-gtx-680-2gb-2560x1600.html

Any ideas/suggestions?
 
Solution
Use a program like afterburner or precision to check your memory usage while gaming. I know that BioShock Infinite uses up to 2500 MB of VRAM on my 1080p monitor.

enemy1g

Honorable
Well using a larger resolution, such as the one you have, you shouldn't really need to have all the eye candy on for the picture quality to look good. Jaggies and whatnot are more noticeable with a 1080p monitor, which is why there's a need for AA and such. Granted, your card is approximately equivalent to a GTX 770, it -might- struggle a little bit at that res, especially if you're trying to play with max/close-to-max graphics settings.
 

slate0

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Jun 5, 2013
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18,515
Very good point about the lack of a need for anti-aliasing.
Starcraft performance is good without AA.
The card was surprisingly good at titanfall when I turned off AA.
BF4 and Bioshock weren't impressive but maybe they were standouts.
I can also experiment with turning down the resolution and getting some "free" AA from my monitor.
Thanks All!