jjblack

This question is one that drives me nuts as well. Sometimes it seems like that extra memory may act like a cache or perhaps like a ramdisk for textures. Often many textures in one rendered frame are reused to create that image. I would hope that developers and nvidia would have figured out a way to not reload every texture in a game that is not being used to render that specific image. That is the whole point of a buffer. Maybe some of that6gb is used as a buffer for transitioning frames to improve average framerate. The card may load 6gb of textures but in any given frame with improved coding only needs access to 3 to generate the image at x resolution and settings. Next frame might use 3.5. Maybe the reason we dont see huge performance gains in cards that have more memory is we are hitting some other limitations with gddr5 unrelated to bus bandwidth or perhaps we arent as far along in core architectural design to piece image renderings together efficiently enoughto make use of all that vram. Yeah the ram is "being used" but it doesnt really translate to significant performance gains. I would hope how these images are constructed and accessed is as important to red and green as giving us more cores, bandwidth and ram etc.