Video RAM and slowdowns

[dibthelegend]

Let me preface this by saying I am by no means a PC expert, but I recently ran into an issue that gave me a question. How much of the total VRAM on your graphics card(s) do you need to be utilizing until slowdowns occur in a game? Obviously, if you hit 100% of the VRAM on your card you're going to be hitting a wall, but does the FPS of your game drop significantly if your using, let's say, 75-95% of your VRAM? At what point does it start seriously affecting your FPS? Thanks to anyone taking time to respond 

[Guest GRRigger]

The card can bottleneck if you have like 8x msaa, UHD textures and only 2gb of ram.

Yes, it can be pretty serious, for example i saw one benchmark when it went from 40 to like lower than 10 fps. Will try to find benchmark now.

 

Worst possible scenario is if you dont have enough space for BIG res textures. It means that it will need to access system memory for them.

 

For example this http://cdn.overclock.net/e/ea/350x700px-LL-ea1c234a_ssaa-2.jpeg

http://cdn.overclock.net/2/2b/499x384px-LL-2bcf4bf2_ssaa-3.jpeg

 

Its cool to have big textures, but just for crazy anti aliasing, i dontthink its worth it.

[dibthelegend]

But what percentage do you think that's the problem? I'm trying to diagnose a problem with my skyrim (That's heavily modded) I tested it, and I hit a max of 1836MB of 2048MB during a massive slowdown to ~15FPS. Card is a GTX 660 2GB.

[X1XNobleX1X]

But what percentage do you think that's the problem? I'm trying to diagnose a problem with my skyrim (That's heavily modded) I tested it, and I hit a max of 1836MB of 2048MB during a massive slowdown to ~15FPS. Card is a GTX 660 2GB.

It is probably not the memory, it's probably a mod you have installed.

[dibthelegend]

Ok, thanks, Atleast I know where to concentrate my search. I didn't think it was a memory problem based on the numbers, the symptoms looked like it though. Time to uninstall things until it works right haha