What exactly is VRAM for? ?

[GamerBlake]

Hey guys!

 

Today I downloaded GPU-Z and it says I have ~11GB of GDDR6 vram on my 2080 Ti and I’m wondering..what exactly is the job of vram? Like what will happen if you don’t have enough? Will games still run? Also how much do I need for gaming at 1440p 144hz?  

 

If anyone could help me out and explain this I would greatly appreciate it.  

 

Thanks!  

[Fasauceome]

Textures for games need to load in. Textures are image files, and files have file sizes.

 

That's at least the simplest way of looking at it. All data that needs to be handled by the GPU needs to be held in memory, just the same as the CPU. Vram does the same job for your graphics card as system ram does for your CPU.

[Yogi_DaBear221]

Not to jack your post but its also something I'm curious about that would maybe make this even more informative,

 

Why would my RX580 8GB PowerColor Red Dragon actually be less powerful than say a 1660 Super with only 6GBs?

[Fasauceome]

3 minutes ago, Yogi_DaBear221 said:

Why would my RX580 8GB PowerColor Red Dragon actually be less powerful than say a 1660 Super with only 6GBs?

The VRam amount doesn't determine performance, unless you're using all of it. A task that needs 8GB of Vram will do a lot better when actually supplied with that ram. However, gaming doesn't actually need all that much ram. Certain examples in gaming have cropped up (friend of mine said plains of Eidolon was eating up his 1070's Vram like crazy) but in the vast majority of examples, 4GB to 6GB seems to be plenty. Only in higher resolutions (therefore larger file sizes to handle) do higher Vram amounts come into play.

[Zando_]

7 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

Textures for games need to load in. Textures are image files, and files have file sizes.

 

That's at least the simplest way of looking at it. All data that needs to be handled by the GPU needs to be held in memory, just the same as the CPU. Vram does the same job for your graphics card as system ram does for your CPU.

^^^ This. It's just RAM for the GPU cores. As for capacity, I don't know of any un-modded titles that can take over 9-10GB VRAM at 4K max settings, and most are far below that. 1440p is even less, I'd wager most games are fine with 6-8GB, many titles will even stay around 4-5GB. 
 

6 minutes ago, Yogi_DaBear221 said:

Why would my RX580 8GB PowerColor Red Dragon actually be less powerful than say a 1660 Super with only 6GBs?

Because the 1660 Super is a faster GPU. VRAM =/= power, it just holds stuff for the GPU core to have easy access to it. Same as how putting 32GB RAM with an i3 won't make it faster than a 9900K. It can affect the overall performance of the card if you're bandwidth limited, but that's usually not enough to tip the scores unless the GPUs were already within a few % of each other. And then on top of that the bandwidth usually only matters for specific architectures (Vega) or at higher resolutions (slightly at 1440p, a little more noticeable at 4K). 

[Stu_Bear]

6 minutes ago, Yogi_DaBear221 said:

Not to jack your post but its also something I'm curious about that would maybe make this even more informative,

 

Why would my RX580 8GB PowerColor Red Dragon actually be less powerful than say a 1660 Super with only 6GBs?

efficiencies or lack there of...that and not many games need 8gb over 6gb.  That and vram speeds differ...6gb pushing 14gbs > 8gb pushing 8gbs..

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Yogi_DaBear221 said:

Why would my RX580 8GB PowerColor Red Dragon actually be less powerful than say a 1660 Super with only 6GBs

Because VRAM is only one component in a Graphics card. GPUs, same as CPUs, don't care about how much Memory they have attached to them, as long as they have enough.
For example if I have a task that takes up 4GB of VRAM then having 12GB won't make that task faster. But If a task wants 6GB of VRAM and I only have 4GB, then it will slow down.


 

[GamerBlake]

4 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

^^^ This. It's just RAM for the GPU cores. As for capacity, I don't know of any un-modded titles that can take over 9-10GB VRAM at 4K max settings, and most are far below that. 1440p is even less, I'd wager most games are fine with 6-8GB, many titles will even stay around 4-5GB. 
 

Because the 1660 Super is a faster GPU. VRAM =/= power, it just holds stuff for the GPU core to have easy access to it. Same as how putting 32GB RAM with an i3 won't make it faster than a 9900K. It can affect the overall performance of the card if you're bandwidth limited, but that's usually not enough to tip the scores unless the GPUs were already within a few % of each other. And then on top of that the bandwidth usually only matters for specific architectures (Vega) or at higher resolutions (slightly at 1440p, a little more noticeable at 4K). 

So then if you’ve never seen more than 9-10 GB @ 4K with max settings then since  my 2080 Ti has 11GB of GDDR6 vram then I shouldn’t have any problems with running out of vram if I’m gaming at 1440p / 144hz?

 

 

[Zando_]

Just now, GamerBlake said:

So then if you’ve never seen more than 9-10 GB @ 4K with max settings then since  my 2080 Ti has 11GB of GDDR6 vram then I shouldn’t have any problems with running out of vram if I’m gaming at 1440p / 144hz?

 

 

No issues at all lol. I've seen two games take nearly 10GB, and those were Rise and Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 4K Very High Textures with the highest AA on (which is upscaling and thus increasing VRAM usage even more). AFAIK like, modded Skyrim when absolutely maxed out can consume horrifying amounts of VRAM, but haven't seen a vanilla game do that. 

Rise of the Tomb Raider will crash on Very High Textures even at 1080p if you only have 6GB VRAM though (at least it did when I tested it on my 980 Ti), so it is one of the few games that actually use over that (it wants around 7.5-8.5GB, so an 8GB+ VRAM card). Still nowhere close to your 11GB VRAM limit lol. Same with the 1080 Ti and Vega FE/RVII (those both have 16GB VRAM). Nothing will really max that even at 4K unless you're running mods or very beefy AA/upscaling settings with maxed out textures while also in a game that uses very heavy ones (something like Destiny 2 will barely eat 4-5GB at 1440p Ultra, I think it miiiiight have hit 6GB VRAM usage at 4K?). 

[GamerBlake]

36 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

No issues at all lol. I've seen two games take nearly 10GB, and those were Rise and Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 4K Very High Textures with the highest AA on (which is upscaling and thus increasing VRAM usage even more). AFAIK like, modded Skyrim when absolutely maxed out can consume horrifying amounts of VRAM, but haven't seen a vanilla game do that. 

Rise of the Tomb Raider will crash on Very High Textures even at 1080p if you only have 6GB VRAM though (at least it did when I tested it on my 980 Ti), so it is one of the few games that actually use over that (it wants around 7.5-8.5GB, so an 8GB+ VRAM card). Still nowhere close to your 11GB VRAM limit lol. Same with the 1080 Ti and Vega FE/RVII (those both have 16GB VRAM). Nothing will really max that even at 4K unless you're running mods or very beefy AA/upscaling settings with maxed out textures while also in a game that uses very heavy ones (something like Destiny 2 will barely eat 4-5GB at 1440p Ultra, I think it miiiiight have hit 6GB VRAM usage at 4K?). 

Oh ok well I play at 1440p anyway so I’m guessing since it’s less demanding those numbers would be lower than the 4K vram usage numbers.

 

The only game I’ve had any sort of vram related issue was with RE:2 (as seen below) where it says I don’t have enough. It still plays fine though.  

 

My guess is thats just an error.

 

Ive played a lot of games with this 2080 Ti like: RE2, DMC 5, Sekiro: SDT, No Man’s Sky,  Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Jedi Fallen Order etc., and other than RE2 none of them maxed out my vram.

 

Also: Why does RE:2 say I have 10.79 GB of vram but GPU-Z says I have 11.264 GB of vram?

 

 

[Zando_]

5 minutes ago, GamerBlake said:

Oh ok well I play at 1440p anyway so I’m guessing since it’s less demanding those numbers would be lower than the 4K vram usage numbers.

 

The only game I’ve had any sort of vram related issue was with RE:2 (as seen below) where it says I don’t have enough. It still plays fine though.  

 

My guess is thats just an error.

 

Ive played a lot of games with this 2080 Ti like: RE2, DMC 5, Sekiro: SDT, No Man’s Sky,  Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Jedi Fallen Order etc., and other than RE2 none of them maxed out my vram.

 

Also: Why does RE:2 say I have 10.79 GB of vram but GPU-Z says I have 11.264 GB of vram?

 

-snip-

IIRC a small amount of VRAM is hardware reserved or something, games can't use it. Whereas GPU-Z will read the specs of your card. 

And hmmm RE:2 is likely using massive textures, I think I've seen some complaints elsewhere about it utterly consuming VRAM. If it didn't crash or oof performance then you're fine though. 

[GamerBlake]

3 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

IIRC a small amount of VRAM is hardware reserved or something, games can't use it. Whereas GPU-Z will read the specs of your card. 

And hmmm RE:2 is likely using massive textures, I think I've seen some complaints elsewhere about it utterly consuming VRAM. If it didn't crash or oof performance then you're fine though. 

Oh yeah it doesn’t affect my performance or crash at all. I still max out all the settings and get 144 FPS @ 1440p at all times. If it is affecting performance it’s not noticeable.

 

Thats crazy that RE2 uses so much when, although it’s a great looking game, it’s nothing super spectacular.

[papajo]

4 hours ago, Yogi_DaBear221 said:

Why would my RX580 8GB PowerColor Red Dragon actually be less powerful than say a 1660 Super with only 6GBs?

That is a complicate question thus the answer will be complex as well... ram capacity is just one metric in a system that has multiple metrics involved in order to achieve a certain result..

 

Its like asking why a r9 3900x computer with 16GB of ram is faster at X task than a i7 8700k with 32GB of ram... 

 

Or why Yiannis Antetokounmpo who is 6 foot 11 tall  is a better player than Anzejs Pasecniks who is 7 foot tall (because in basket height is a very important metric yet as I said above just one metric in a complex system which in this case is called basketball performance) 

 

 

However we could generalize  metrics to two groups, task at hand and architecture of the GPU.

 

And architecture is not just performance its intertwined with the task at hand.. 

 

For example in your question it so happens that an RX 580 has 6.17 TF compute performance and the 1660 5.1 TF (32bit for both) yet the 1660 produces more FPS. 

 

And here is why task at hand and architecture play a role. 

 

The RX 580 is simply underutilized because its architecture is built more with multitasking at mind but task at hand (most of the games out there) do not provide as much multitasking therefor the card that depends less on multitasking is the card that will perform better on games and that's why AMD "fine wine" exists because they try to make the task at hand be more prone to multitasking therefor utilize their GPU more. 

 

but you only can do so much tweaking before the need of completely recode the source code that's why results are limited and that's why AMD has changed to an new architecture called RDNA which is less depended on multitasking. 

[Tee86]

ME: "Okay google"

MY PHONE: "Beep"

ME: "What is vram in gpu for?"

MY PHONE: "Stands for "Video Random Access Memory" and is pronounced "V-RAM." System RAM is great for loading and running programs, but when you need graphics power, VRAM is where it's at. This is the memory used to store image data that the computer displays; it acts as a buffer between the CPU and the video card. When a picture is to be displayed on the screen, the image is first read by the processor and then written to the VRAM. The data is then converted by a RAM digital-to-analog converter (RAMDAC) into analog signals that are sent to the display. Of course, the whole process happens so quickly, you don't notice it. Unlike most system RAM, VRAM chips are dual-ported, which means that while the display is reading from VRAM to refresh the currently displayed image, the processor is writing a new image to the VRAM. This prevents the display from flickering between the redrawing of images.

There are many different types of VRAM. One popular kind is called Synchronous Graphics RAM (SGRAM). It is an inexpensive type of RAM that is clock-synchronized. This means data can be modified in a single operation rather than as a sequence of read, write, and update operations. This allows background, foreground, and image fills to be handled more efficiently. Another type of VRAM is Rambus Dynamic RAM (RDRAM). It is designed by Rambus and includes a proprietary Rambus bus that speeds up the transfer of data through it. Video editing pros like this chip since it is optimized for video streaming. A third type of VRAM is Window RAM (WRAM). This high-performance VRAM is dual-ported, has about 25% more bandwidth than standard VRAM, and typically costs less. Finally, there is Multibank Dynamic RAM (MDRAM). This is also high-performance VRAM, developed by MoSys, which divides the memory into divisions of 32 KB that can be accessed individually. This makes memory transfers more efficient and increases overall performance. Another advantage of MDRAM is that it can be manufactured with just the right amount of memory for a given resolution, so it is cheaper to manufacture than most other types of VRAM." source

[trevb0t]

7 hours ago, GamerBlake said:

Oh ok well I play at 1440p anyway so I’m guessing since it’s less demanding those numbers would be lower than the 4K vram usage numbers.

 

The only game I’ve had any sort of vram related issue was with RE:2 (as seen below) where it says I don’t have enough. It still plays fine though.  

 

My guess is thats just an error.

 

Ive played a lot of games with this 2080 Ti like: RE2, DMC 5, Sekiro: SDT, No Man’s Sky,  Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Jedi Fallen Order etc., and other than RE2 none of them maxed out my vram.

 

Also: Why does RE:2 say I have 10.79 GB of vram but GPU-Z says I have 11.264 GB of vram?

 

 

That "Shaders" value is what people are referring to. Shaders are the digital material on a digital piece of geometry. The shader can be modified to do anything from reflection to transparency to diffuse color to displaying images, etc. 

In games the shaders are typically semi glossed shaders with an image painted on (like if you look at a rock, it's a rock shaped piece of geometry with a connected image file that provides anything on the rock that provides "texture.") They also include often what's called "bump maps" or "Normal maps" which can create an optical illusion of geometric texture (like create fake shadow to indicate depth in something like a forehead wrinkle. You can actually model a wrinkle in, which means more geometric surface to texture and to render, or you can make one big surface with a few lines painted across it, and a bump map to make it look like the sunken areas are sunken, when in reality it's a flat surface.)

The number of shaders depends on how dense the geometric scene is that's on your screen. If it's thousands of things in the frame, it's that many shaders and probably more. Texture quality is also a factor (if you're playing 1080p, the images for the texture with be 1080p. Copy paster for 1440p/4k/etc. So higher res means bigger file sizes to render from.) So for older GPUs with 2GB of VRAM and maximum 1200 shaders, if the scene exceeds that number, random textures will just be omitted from the scene. (Random grey or green surfaces. REALLY distracting.) Farcry 5 was a big wakeup call for people with 2GB cards. 

 

Memory also improves each generation on how many shaders can be handled. So an 8GB card from 2015 will likely handle fewer shaders than an 8GB card from 2019.

[papajo]

6 hours ago, trevb0t said:

Memory also improves each generation on how many shaders can be handled. So an 8GB card from 2015 will likely handle fewer shaders than an 8GB card from 2019.

8gb are 8gb no matter what generation we are talking about. 

 

Vram can get faster, shader can get smaller in filesize but 8GB worth of shaders is 8 GB worth of shaders either it is from 2015 or from 2025 in the future 

14 hours ago, GamerBlake said:

Also: Why does RE:2 say I have 10.79 GB of vram but GPU-Z says I have 11.264 GB of vram?

GPU-Z doesnt tell you that you have 11.264 GB it tells you that you have 11264 MB which is 11 GB (1GB=1024MB)

 

As for RE2 it can only use available Vrma if it says 10.79 it means that 0,21GB is used elsewhere outside the game.