How long will it be before 2GB isn't enough for max settings on 1080p?

probably in the near future. I have a 2GB card and when i play Crysis 2 at 1080p with DX11 and hi-res textures enabled my VRAM hits 1600mb, so its getting close.

Any of those cards are good for 1080p for now.

Less than 1% of programs will be able to fully use that. I suggest getting a single GTX 690 or Radeon 7990 if you need that much horsepower. Even a single GTX 680 would do you well for 2-3 years. It's a huge waste of money.

I can't find the 7990 anywhere. I really, really want it though. That'd be my first choice in a heartbeat.

7990's are hard to come by since only 2 brand exist as its not an officially supported product, the Powercolor 7990(2 models, normal and devil 13) and the unreleased HIS 7990 which I dont think has hit the market yet.


the market has very limited quantities of them and more or less sell out in short moments.

Is there any estimate? I won't be able to build this computer until at least a month from now anyways.

the most you can do(at least in the U.S) if you wanted 7990's is to go to the newegg powercolor 7990 page and set up a product restocking notification. as for the HIS card, I wouldn't know. I would personally Crossfire/Sli in my opinion. but some people prefer to only have a single card or so.

I want to crossfire the 7990. but if you were to spend ~$1800 on video cards, what would you choose?

I really couldn't imagine myself spending that much on gpus alone, but If i had, how i would have approached it is:

7970 crossfire if you are either a:
Bencher
Water cooling system set up as you can make use of the unlocked voltage control

670/680 sli if:
utilize a bunch of the nvidia technologies(physx, cuda, 3d, avsync)

the sole advantage i would give to 690s/7990s would be that it leaves more room for air to circulate, and the fact that owning them is slightly unique, as a very small minority even owns them.

What setup for $1800 would give the absolute most fps? I know it's pointlessly overkill but still.

I would think quad 7970's(non ghz) but i haven't really seen any quad sli vs quad crossfire charts recently so i cant say i'm the most confident with that answer.

I heard QuadFire and Quad-SLI setups sometimes decrease performance rather than increase. I also heard they cause a lot of problems but nobody really specified what.

because games have to be specifically coded to utilize crossfire and sli. some games reject the setup and gain negative scaling(Arma 2 is a prime example). that situation isnt really the hardwares fault, but rather the software, and since crossfire/sli is a minority in the gpu world, its priority isn't the highest.

What is your overall budget? These parts would only last you a few years you know. It's best to upgrade the GPU every 2-3 years and CPU every 3-4 years. (Assuming you bought good products)

Using 3 monitor setup bf3 is now using 1.9 vram, so I say in the near future.

Ha, i already hit 2000mb on BF3 at 1080p. It was a armored kill map.

If you want my advice, get a single GTX 690 and i7 3930k if you have that much money. Anything else would take an extremely high end CPU to not recieve bottleneck. If you're looking to future proof, invest in your Optical, Storage, case and PSU. Everything else is outdated in 2 years. Unless you absolutely need all of that GPU power, getting it is useless.

for 1080p 2GB will last for quite sometime. want to reduce VRAM usage? just disable MSAA and use FXAA instead  . using mod is another story though. honestly i was hoping games to use those excessive VRAM on gpu from the get go even before the mod or extreme level of AA being use. we at the point where hardware capabilities are far ahead from what softwares need. it is much better if high setting in every games only possible with high end cards, mid range cards (like 7800 series and 660 series) only capable of medium setting at best. then we starts hearing about poor coding, poor optimization bla bla bla....

 



to make it really work in games are one of the main challenger but that decrease performance could be from CPU cannot keep up with gpu. an i7 920 at 3.6Ghz will not be able to keep up with 3 GTX580  

I wouldn't go too crazy. true, in the future that extra vram will probably be needed. But in reality, by then, the card will probably be too slow to keep up with what's being thrown at it. And for sure, the way the hottest, newest games seem to break barriers the architecture of the card won't keep up either.

( Crysis 6- Skyrim Ultimate w/super texture- DX13, etc. )

^ +1

since you mentioned that the card will be too slow to utiliize the vram i wanna know which cards can and cannot utilize more than 1 gb of vram at 1080p ?
7750 cannot for sure. how about 7770 and 7850 ? is it sensible for someone to go for 2 gb variant of 7770 ? or is 1gb of 7850 all it can handle ?

in case of 7770 the gpu core will out of grunt before it can fully utilize 2GB of VRAM. and he does not said about VRAM being slow to be utilized. just imagine this: right now you got 680 with 4GB of VRAM. in the future when 4GB is the norm for games to use most likely GTX680 are outdated in terms of performance. it has the required VRAM but the core itself was to slow to keep up the game graphical demand

why do people buy 4 gb 680's then ?

the only reason to run more than 2 gb vram gaming wise is either extreme modding, or multiple screens.

The 3rd or 4th card in SLI/CF doesn't add much value, some people go for such setups because they need those extra 10 FPS in their Eyefinity setups in specific games such as Metro 2033.

So imagine yourself spending extra $1000 on GPUs in order to get a 15% performance increase.

Neither this.

The most taxing technique used ever that eats up VRAM is AA, there's no problem running the most modern games @ 2560x with a medium range card such as HD 7770, but the real problem is enabling more than 2X MSAA on such a higher resolution since tons of large high quality textures and packs need to be stored and loaded. So the question always remains of what settings will you be using.

Yeah every two years a product for half the price will beat that one. Just something to think about...

For today's gaming 2gb is enough.While BF3 was using 1.5-1.6gb from my 660 ti,in crysis 3 it was 1.3GB.Metro 2033 and Witcher 2 pulls about 1GB maximum.Again I did go past 1900mb running new dawn.However the results of a gtx 680 or 670 might vary.

Also keep in mind, that when a game is using 1600mb of vram, that doesn't mean that if you only had 1500mb of vram, you'd have a slow down. Sometimes a game's memory management can adjust itself when less ram is available.

If it needs more memory, doesn't it just go to the RAM?

^then it turns to the additional system memory allocated for the video adapter but this results to a loss of bandwidth.Generally upto 512mb of excess memory doesn't affect much.But relying too much on this hampers performance.