EVGA GTX570 SLI... Need help deciding between 1.25gb or 2.5gb?

[rwlomas]

Hey guys,

I'm looking at purchasing 2 X EVGA 570 cards but I don't know whether to go the 2.5gb or the 1.25gb OC version.

BTW has anyone actually done a review or benchmarked the 2.5gb card?

I'm just wondering if I really need to go for the extra memory or not?

I'll be running 2 x 24' and 1 x 27' monitors. The big one is mainly for watching video.

As for games, i'll run them at the highest res as possible within reasonable frame rates, as I guess the higher the res the better?
But it's not realy a great deal as I would rather have higher quality settings on a lower res then sacrifice FPS by going a higher res.

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,

Rohan

 

[mdd1963]

Unless you are at or above 2560x1600, with 16xAA/AF/ultra high quality, then the standard 1.2GB is enough....(if the price premium for the double VRAM version was not excessive, I still might choose them, but, this card would be no faster at 1920x1200, for instance)

(more VRAM does not make it faster unless/until the framebuffer is insufficient, as might happen using 3 each monitors for 5700x1200, etc....)

 

[swifty_morgan]

go for the most memory. you're running at highest settings and trying to run physics on those cards. then you say you're running multiple monitors. lack of memory will hold you back under all circumstances. i had 1gig cards and 1+gig cards at lower resolutions and depending on the usage ( games, etc. ) the more video memory the better. i now run 2gig cards without flaw in anything. will never buy lesser.

 

[ubercake]

It would make sense and in theory - all things being equal - more RAM should equal better performance over multiple screens, but I think the performance has more to do with the technology being used as illustrated in this review:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/3d-vision-surround-stereoscopic-gaming,2672-6.html

This review benchmarks 2 5870s with 2GB of VRAM in Eyefinity versus 2 GTX 480s with 1.5GB of VRAM in 3D Surround (2D mode). Both are last gen single GPU flagships. There isn't much out there with regard to the newest cards and multi-monitor gaming setups.

At any rate, in each case, the 1.5 GB cards in SLI provide higher framerates than the 2GB in crossfire across 3 monitors. So it goes to show that more RAM is not necessarily going to equal better performance over multiple monitors.

The other thing we can look at is the difference in the 6950 1GB and 2GB at 2560x1600:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_6950_1_GB/6.html

Here, we see the 1GB card performing better than the 2GB.

As a result, I'd say if you have money to burn, go for the higher RAM. Otherwise, you'll probably see great and close to equivalent performance even with less RAM.

 

[madtech01]

if your planning on running 3 monitors your better off going with an AMD graphics card.
I am a big nVidia Fanboy but when you go SLI and tripple monitor with the GTX 570 you will loose HDCP support.
But with the AMD graphics Cards you will still be able to have HDCP support with 3 monitors, just mentioning this because you said you would be watching videos on your 27" monitor and to stream content from sites like Netflix and iTunes you have to have HDCP supported video cards and monitors.

 

[ps3hacker12]

hi just a reccommendation but wouldn't two 6950 2GBs be better value for money:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150530

or this 6950 2GB:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150549

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/307?vs=299

 

[swifty_morgan]

want faster performance get a card with a faster processor. want better
performance" get the card with more ram. if you follow most every review of this sort it always has to do with frame rates. NOT real performance unless you think performance is solely a FPS thing. it's not. anti-aliasing and just about every other setting will hinder your performance with the less ram you have.... at these higher resolutions. you can have a card with 1gig and a card with 2gigs and the FPS will be the same or close. but crank up the settings and the one with less ram will falter, not giving smooth game play. that's not something these automated benchmarks will show, and if the reviewer is getting compensation of any sort, they wouldn't make that FACT readily available.

 

[jjb8675309]

^oh yeah the 1.2 gb a vram on my gtx 570 is just crippling at 1080p, :lol:

I'm not on board with what you are saying up there

 

[mdd1963]

He's saying that when gaming on a single monitor at 1920x1080, 1.25gb vs 2.5GB give identical results....

If attempting gaming with 3 large monitors, you would definitely want more than a 1.2gb framebuffer.....

 

[ubercake]

I showed two reviews. One review had 3 monitors with a 2GB crossfire vs a 1.5 GB SLI. The 1.5GB performed better. Even on the last-gen flagships, they were reluctant to turn up the AA (or other effects in some cases) whether the card had 1.5 or 2GB:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/3d-vision-surround-stereoscopic-gaming,2672-5.html

One review had single-screen resolutions up to 2560x1600 (~2/3 of a 5760x1080s pixels to process) with a card at 1GB consistently beating the performance of the same card with 2GB.

In theory, you should get better performance at higher resolutions with more GB of VRAM, but why not in practice?

 

[rwlomas]

I showed two reviews. One review had 3 monitors with a 2GB crossfire vs a 1.5 GB SLI. The 1.5GB performed better. Even on the last-gen flagships, they were reluctant to turn up the AA (or other effects in some cases) whether the card had 1.5 or 2GB:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/3d-vision-surround-stereoscopic-gaming,2672-5.html

One review had single-screen resolutions up to 2560x1600 (~2/3 of a 5760x1080s pixels to process) with a card at 1GB consistently beating the performance of the same card with 2GB.

In theory, you should get better performance at higher resolutions with more GB of VRAM, but why not in practice?

I'm not an expert but I'll give my thoughts.. when we look at those reviews we're not comparing apples with apples... it's one brands tech Vs. another, It doesn't really tell us whether vram makes much of a difference (it may in fact, however the technology may outweigh any performance gain due to extra vram). This is why it would be great if someone could do a review on 570 1.25gb Vs. 2.5gb so we could compare apples with apples.

In the other review you posted where the Radeon 1gb card outperforms the 2gb, this may be due to some issue with drivers not recognizing the additional vram, maybe even penalising the card for it? As one would think double the vram would certainly give some performance increase (otherwise why the price difference?). Also this is another Radeon review, it would be good to see a similar Nvidia benchmark to see whether it's just an issue with Radeon cards.

Just anothing thing I'm not clear on... when we talk about running 3 monitors and playing games, I'm assuming the game will only run on one monitor, while the other two are on, but just showing the windows desktop and whatever programs are running in the background... OR are we talking about running the game across more than one monitor?

In terms of the price premium for buying 2.5gb over 1.25gb GTX 570's:

The EVGA GTX570 1.25gb SC is $375 x 2 = $750
The EVGA GTX570 2.5gb is $455 x 2= $910

Therefore a $160 premium (I live in Australia btw)

I could almost look at purchasing a 590 for that or 2x EVGA 580 SC's (I would be paying a little bit extra here: $555 x 2 = $1110).

In terms of value what does everyone think?

Cheers.

 

[rwlomas]

want faster performance get a card with a faster processor. want better
performance" get the card with more ram. if you follow most every review of this sort it always has to do with frame rates. NOT real performance unless you think performance is solely a FPS thing. it's not. anti-aliasing and just about every other setting will hinder your performance with the less ram you have.... at these higher resolutions. you can have a card with 1gig and a card with 2gigs and the FPS will be the same or close. but crank up the settings and the one with less ram will falter, not giving smooth game play. that's not something these automated benchmarks will show, and if the reviewer is getting compensation of any sort, they wouldn't make that FACT readily available.

Swifty I'm not sure If I'm understanding you here, let me try...

Your saying FPS is not everything and higher vram will certainly outperform cards with lesser vram when scaling up textures, AA, physics etc. And you also point out the bechmarks don't caputre this.

I thought that benchmarks do capture the difference when turning up the effects, which is reflected in the FPS. The higher the FPS the smoother it runs right?

Can you link any reviews here which illustrate your view?

Cheers

 

[swifty_morgan]

The reviews I've read where more vram ( at higher res's... 1600+ ) are few and far between where someone will tell you straight up that game play suffers because of "stuttering" or whatever you would call it. Most of the reviews you read are done in "automation" mode where the reviewer has no idea how well or how bad the game plays. All they are interested in is the FPS because most people fall for " the more FPS the better" BS.......
I can tell you that FarCry2/Crysis1+2/BBC2 all play much smoother with more vram than they do with 1gig or slightly more than 1gig. Personally, untill DX11 stuff started hitting the mainstream I thought 1.5gigs was enough. Not anymore.
One thing to remember when buying cards. You will have the investment for a few years/you can't add ram to them/games change everyday as well as the demand on your hardware from these games. Good Luck.

 

[rwlomas]

The reviews I've read where more vram ( at higher res's... 1600+ ) are few and far between where someone will tell you straight up that game play suffers because of "stuttering" or whatever you would call it. Most of the reviews you read are done in "automation" mode where the reviewer has no idea how well or how bad the game plays. All they are interested in is the FPS because most people fall for " the more FPS the better" BS.......
I can tell you that FarCry2/Crysis1+2/BBC2 all play much smoother with more vram than they do with 1gig or slightly more than 1gig. Personally, untill DX11 stuff started hitting the mainstream I thought 1.5gigs was enough. Not anymore.
One thing to remember when buying cards. You will have the investment for a few years/you can't add ram to them/games change everyday as well as the demand on your hardware from these games. Good Luck.

Hi Swifty,

That sounds interesting, care to expand on the "more FPS the better" BS...?

So when reviewing a card, how does the reviewer actually test the performance during gameplay? Do they have a simulation to run (like running a test on 3DMark)?

OR do they actually play the game just as anyone else would?

I certainly agree with you in buying more than necessary to insure against future demands from games. The question is...

Will SLI 570's be enough to run the latest games at high specs for at least two years (stretching it to three maybe)? That's what I'm hoping to achieve anyway.

Cheers

 

[jyjjy]

This review benchmarks 2 5870s with 2GB of VRAM in Eyefinity versus 2 GTX 480s with 1.5GB of VRAM in 3D Surround (2D mode). Both are last gen single GPU flagships. There isn't much out there with regard to the newest cards and multi-monitor gaming setups.

This simply isn't a relevant comparison. The GTX 480 is just the better card of the two(by about 10%) and SLI tended to scale significantly better than Crossfire on ATI/AMD cards before the current HD6000 series. Both of these factors are likely more important than the different amounts of RAM.

 

[swifty_morgan]

Hi Swifty,

That sounds interesting, care to expand on the "more FPS the better" BS...?

So when reviewing a card, how does the reviewer actually test the performance during gameplay? Do they have a simulation to run (like running a test on 3DMark)?

OR do they actually play the game just as anyone else would?

I certainly agree with you in buying more than necessary to insure against future demands from games. The question is...

Will SLI 570's be enough to run the latest games at high specs for at least two years (stretching it to three maybe)? That's what I'm hoping to achieve anyway.

Cheers

Do your own homework. I've been down this road before. Don't want to trust a user trust the review guys. I don't care anymore.

 

[rwlomas]

That's not very helpful, I was actually interested in what you have to say... but if you don't want to add anything thats fine.

Don't worry I am doing my own homework, there are some very insightful posts on the EVGA board.

Cheers

 

[swifty_morgan]

Sorry, woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Mondays.........

performance isn't always a FPS thing. you have to take into account what you're playing and are going to play. the resolution you're going to play at and what your game settings will be. the more goodies you turn on the more it will effect how the game plays.
2 examples from my personal experiences. i had a gtx560 and a 6950. both had 2gig of memory. the nvidia card choked in Metro 2033 and FarCry2. same settings. no physics. both cards were proclaimed to get decent fps but one card tanked in areas the other didn't making the games un-enjoyable. no reviewer said anything other than these cards are great because the both get 80fps.... BS!. from my experiences if you game at 1680x1050 or above get a card with more than one gig of memory or you'll be playing at lower settings and not seeing what the game has to offer and you won't get smooth game play. throw in DX11 and tessellation and the point is moot.
back when Crysis came out everybody said how bad the game was coded. maybe. but back then i was running a gtx260. it spit and sputtered and had to lower settings to get smooth game play. swapped up to a gtx260 with twice the vram ( msi lightning ) and had no problems with that game ever again, at higher resolutions and higher in game settings. Don't compromise your build on automated benchmark results. they don't tell the entire truth. if they did the story would be different. i don't remember reading "minimum" fps in too many of these reviews.....
i knew that when i bought my old 5850 that i should have gotten the one with 2gig of memory. i didn't. i got the 1gig version. big mistake. it sits unused. didn't want to spend the extra money. i'd still be using it today if i had. i still use the lightning in one of my machines. why....... because like the little train...... it could. how's that for a rant ?

 

[jjb8675309]

I dont buy it, in the day of the gtx 260 there is no way that core is even strong enough to make use of the 2 gb buffer. Personally I have not seen any quantifiable benefit from a 2 gig card except for a select game or two.

personally I think the 2 gigs of vram is more of a marketing scheme than anything else, it will come more into play in the future but for now; not needed for the most part

 

[jyjjy]

i knew that when i bought my old 5850 that i should have gotten the one with 2gig of memory. i didn't. i got the 1gig version. big mistake. it sits unused.

Give it to me

 

[rwlomas]

Thanks for that Swifty, I know how you feel... Mondays are like death.

I've finished doing my homework so I thought I'd say thanks to all that replied and share what I've found.

You might notice from my first post I had no idea that running 3 monitors actually meant running a game across three monitors. My original intent was to play games on a single monitor, yet have two other monitors running in desktop mode (mainly background programs and a big one for watching movies etc)

Since then I've seen Radeon's Eyeinfinity and NVIDIA's Surround in action. So now I can actually see why anyone would need more than 1gb of VRAM on their graphics cards. Anyone interested, check out this thread from the EVGA forums where one user has benchmarked the amount of VRAM games use up while running insane resolutions across three monitors: http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?&m=833917&mpage=2

For all my original purposes all I would need at this point in time is a card with no more than 1gb in VRAM, as the same guy from EVGA's forums has run similar benches on just running a single monitor at 1080: http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?high=&m=992959&mpage=1#995378

I say at this point in time because I think swifty has a fair point. If your like me and want to turn on all the bells and whistles and experience the game to it's fullest (whilst still enjoying relatively good frame rates...) and games are approaching 1gb of VRAM now, then you have new games with DX11 bringing more to the table, I think it's probably wise if your looking at 'futureproofing' your system, to buy the card with the more VRAM. Or else be prepared to upgrade sooner or cop it playing on 'normal' settings.. which may be just fine?

Since seeing Surround 2D and with 3D gaming just born I've decided to buy a single GTX580 3gb card now, and I'll probably get another whenever my wallet heals back up (and the price has dropped a bit). This is only because I'll probably look at upgrading my monitors so I can play Surround sometime in the not too distant future

Cheers

 

[jjb8675309]

this is such a crock of *** you do not need 2 GB of vram to game and ive seen very small benefit if any from increased RAM on a single 1080p. The increased Vram is much more of a marketing ploy then anything yeah there might be a game or two that can see a few more fps from the increased vram but other than that, no. True with dx11 and blah blah blah but for now it makes no quantifiable difference and I dont know where people get this crap.

 

[jyjjy]

always start out with one single strongest card you can get.
you if you can afford 2-570's then I'd just by a single 580.
then work on SLI the 580 for the next round of upgrades.
either save the money left over and/or spend it on other hardware like adding SSD or something.
so sure starting out 2-570's beats a single 580, no brainer.
but in the long run, the single 580 is a better option especially starting out...
my point of view..

This is really poor advice imo. The GTX 580 is simply a terrible value for the money. It's about 15% faster than the GTX 570 while costing about 50% more. There's almost no circumstance in which it makes sense financially to buy one IMO.
I agree with your sentiment about a good single card often being a wiser than using 2 weaker ones but its REALLY not the case with the specific cards you mention considering their price/performance.

 

[rwlomas]

Yeah you're right about 15% better performance for 50% more the money.

There are a few other reasons why the 580 3gb.

I could almost go triple 570s for slightly more $$... however my power supply won't allow it and to upgrade, it would end up tipping the cost in favour of SLI 580.

The other reason is I heard the reference cards run quiter and produce less heat than the HD cards for EVGA . There is no review at the moment on the 2.5gb card so I'm hesitant for that reason. I would have gone MSI Lightning but unfortunately It wont fit in my case (same for competitors aftermarket cards).

The third is right now there is no one besides EVGA who makes a 2.5gb 570. If competitors had one I would look at that.

So that's where it comes down to the single 580 3gb to start with (bear in mind sometime down the track i'm gunning for NVIDIA Surround, maybe even 3D if the price comes down on the monitors in the next while).

My wallet suffers but ahwel, I'll save by staying home and enjoying my new card

 

[rwlomas]

Best answer selected by rwlomas.