Historical equivalent reference.

[Eighjan]

Back in the mists of time, you used to be able to calculate what graphics card you would need for any given resolution... (vertical resolution x horizontal resolution x 3 colours) / 8 = amount of VRAM req'd.

 

Now; given that graphical capability has gone relatively stratospheric, this is a pointless formula.

 

How would you calculate what would be the realistic minimum graphical capability required to happily run 4K @ 144hz...?

[IPD]

As that's pushing even the limits of current cabling limits and connectivity--the answer is simple.  Highest end GPU available and pray.  I don't think Nvidia has any plans for DP 2.0 until at least RTX 40 series.

[jaslion]

19 minutes ago, Eighjan said:

Back in the mists of time, you used to be able to calculate what graphics card you would need for any given resolution... (vertical resolution x horizontal resolution x 3 colours) / 8 = amount of VRAM req'd.

 

Now; given that graphical capability has gone relatively stratospheric, this is a pointless formula.

 

How would you calculate what would be the realistic minimum graphical capability required to happily run 4K @ 144hz...?

I mean even back then the formula was at best a good guess as to what you'd need. Today to just display it any card with the dp port or hdmi 2.1 can do it basically. To run your content well that entirely depends on what you are doing as even a rtx 3090 isn't a 4k 120fps high setting card in all games.

[Eighjan]

So; high(est) res., high refresh really IS God level graphics then...?

 

OK; I had it in my head that it was more 'mainstream' than I thought... not to worry.

[jaslion]

9 minutes ago, Eighjan said:

So; high(est) res., high refresh really IS God level graphics then...?

 

OK; I had it in my head that it was more 'mainstream' than I thought... not to worry.

It will always not be mainstream. Since the moment something becomes mainstream something else higher end has already replaced it :p.

 

But really just look at reviews and stuff 4k 120hz stuff is not doable in new demanding games even on the highest end cards without dropping some settings. Yes there are outliers like doom but those are few and far between.

[tikker]

5 hours ago, Eighjan said:

Back in the mists of time, you used to be able to calculate what graphics card you would need for any given resolution... (vertical resolution x horizontal resolution x 3 colours) / 8 = amount of VRAM req'd.

 

Now; given that graphical capability has gone relatively stratospheric, this is a pointless formula.

Where does the divide come from? What units of VRAM does that give? If the division is supposed to be multiplication then the formula itself makes sense, but I don't see the link to VRAM.

 

For 24 bit colour it would be

(vertical * horizontal) [pixels] * 3 [colours / pixel] * 8 [bits/colour] = bits VRAM required to store one frame

If you use transparency as the fourth "colour" change the 3 to 4. In either case you'll see that the memory footprint of a frame isn't that big. Even at 3840x2160 a single frame is only 33 MB. There will of course be a ton more stuff stored in memory like all kinds of textures.

5 hours ago, Eighjan said:

How would you calculate what would be the realistic minimum graphical capability required to happily run 4K @ 144hz...?

You can use this calculator, for example, to calculate the required bandwidth:

 

[Glenwing]

1 hour ago, tikker said:

Where does the divide come from? What units of VRAM does that give? If the division is supposed to be multiplication then the formula itself makes sense, but I don't see the link to VRAM.

 

For 24 bit colour it would be

(vertical * horizontal) [pixels] * 3 [colours / pixel] * 8 [bits/colour] = bits VRAM required to store one frame

 

I think the division by 8 is converting from bits to bytes, and the color depth (8 bpc) was just left out. But if you assume 8 bpc color depth then it just cancels out with the conversion to bytes anyway, so when simplified it would just be H × V × 3 = frame size in bytes.

[Eighjan]

2 hours ago, tikker said:

Where does the divide come from? What units of VRAM does that give?

From waaaay back in the day, when VRAM was measured in MB, rather than GB as it is today.

Rethinking it, the equation was H x V x 3 / (1024 x 1024); so 1024 x 768 equated to a 2.25 MB card being needed (4MB being the option to choose).

[tikker]

1 hour ago, Eighjan said:

From waaaay back in the day, when VRAM was measured in MB, rather than GB as it is today.

Rethinking it, the equation was H x V x 3 / (1024 x 1024); so 1024 x 768 equated to a 2.25 MB card being needed (4MB being the option to choose).

Right, dividing by those factors makes more sense. Well that formula is universal and won't change. Nowadays it's hard to simply estimate, so you should just look at benchmarks regarding VRAM usage (and be careful about the difference between actual and allocated usage).