VRAM Future Proffing

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Ethan Carlone

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Dec 16, 2015
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I am planning to build a new gaming rig soon. Looking over the 1070 and 1080 I originally settled on a gtx 1080. I also had plans to sli in the future. However, will 8GB of VRAM still be enough for 3 or 4 more years? Thanks.
 
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photonboy
1) 8GB is plenty for the next few years. Very few games need more than 4GB, and frankly making a game that need more than 8GB would be stupid from the point of SELLING the game.

Game consoles also influence this since their memory is set (about 6GB or so usable as the system and video memory). Obviously a higher resolution increases this but what I'm saying is I don't see the amount likely to spiral out of control.

There are also other ways to reduce VRAM requirements such as streaming from system memory (shared tile), and newer anti-aliasing methods.

2) 4K-> I wouldn't recommend actually playing many games at 4K. For a monitor use 2560x1440. Unless you can play at 4K and the FPS is where you want it (and graphically it looks better...
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Ethan Carlone

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Dec 16, 2015
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Most Likely I will be playing at 4k Resolution.
 
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photonboy

photonboy

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Jun 20, 2006
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1) 8GB is plenty for the next few years. Very few games need more than 4GB, and frankly making a game that need more than 8GB would be stupid from the point of SELLING the game.

Game consoles also influence this since their memory is set (about 6GB or so usable as the system and video memory). Obviously a higher resolution increases this but what I'm saying is I don't see the amount likely to spiral out of control.

There are also other ways to reduce VRAM requirements such as streaming from system memory (shared tile), and newer anti-aliasing methods.

2) 4K-> I wouldn't recommend actually playing many games at 4K. For a monitor use 2560x1440. Unless you can play at 4K and the FPS is where you want it (and graphically it looks better which is rare) don't bother.

3) SLI-> it appears multi-GPU support isn't going to be very good for a while. newer game engines seem to have frame dependency (so can't send one to GPU1 and the next to GPU2) which is likely why they gave up on Batman AK.

Eventually we'll see multi-GPU with SFR (Split Frame Rendering) when game engines more natively provide support but that's going to take close to two years likely to make it a lot easier.

SFR also splits the tasks of the same frame so 2x8GB would actually be a 16GB framebuffer so you'd have 16GB usable. Not in normal SLI which uses AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering) because both separate cards work on their own frame so you still are limited by 8GB per frame.
 
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photonboy

photonboy

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Jun 20, 2006
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the need for more than 8GB of system memory is increasing though. games swap data into system memory and back. as this increases we need more space. A couple games already recommend 16GB.

so you might want something like:

i5-6600K, and
2x8GB DDR4 2666MHz CL15 memory kit
 
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