Gigabyte GTX 970 Xtreme OC 3.5GB VRAM?

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Zeb87

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Feb 13, 2016
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I have been searching for a new GPU and have been moving towards the Gigabyte GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming OC Edition. Upon further research I discovered that the NVIDIA GTX 970 only uses 3.5GB of VRAM at full speed, and then accesses the other 500MB of VRAM at a slower speed. My question is this: Does the same apply to the Gigabyte card I'm looking at? Will I only get 3.5GB of VRAM or is that only on the NVIDIA specific cards? Any help would be greately appreciated. Thank you.
 
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The VRAM setup is identical for all versions of GTX 970, regardless of manufacturer. The VRAM configuration seems to be more of a concern for fanboys than it is for actual game performance.
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Zeb87

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Thank you for the swift answers guys. Given that the Gigabyte GTX 970 Xtreme OC Edition has the same "issue", would the r9 390 with 8GB VRAM then be a better card performance-wise? Or should I stick with the Gigabyte with 4GB VRAM? My main concern at this point is future proofing myself against needing more than 3.5GB of VRAM in a year or 2.
 
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neieus

neieus

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In this price range you really can't go wrong performance wise between these to cards. Thanks to game works nvidia tend to be faster after a games release but over time AMD tend to pull ahead once they update their driver's. That being said I would recommend the 390 since these newly released games are requiring more and more vram. From my own experience The Rise of the Tomb Raider on max settings csn consumed over 6GB of vram and that's on 1080p.
 
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17seconds

17seconds

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Quotes from Tomb Raider performance reviews:

"It seems as though Crystal Dynamics' engine will happily use as much VRAM as it can, but is very well optimized to make do with much less without sacrificing framerates."
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Performance_Analysis/Rise_of_the_Tomb_Raider/4.html

"Rise of the Tomb Raider is reasonably demanding in is graphics memory with the best IQ settings. We'll take two 4GB cards. You will notice that up-to Full HD 3 GB is recommended, mind you that the 2GB cards played fine though. At a QHD resolution of 2560x1440 a 4GB card is recommended and at Ultra HD a 4GB card or better is something you will need. The game will eat away what you can throw at it."
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/rise_of_the_tomb_raider_pc_graphics_performance_benchmark_review,10.html
 
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