Statements about 1080p and GTX 970's

[Guest]

The only time I've ever been close to the limit is when playing Grid Autosport with DSR.

 

BF4 uses about 2.5GB when I play.

[Guest]

So 3.5 Gb isn't enough at 1080p ... An extra 500 Mb for £150 on a GTX 980 is going to solve all your problems and never become Vram limited ...

No, I'm just not understanding this. If the 3.5 Gb on a 970 cant even manage at 1080p, how can the 980 manage at 1440p - 4k?

All this complaining is one of the dumbest things ever in the history of video cards.

But NVM, I suppose the answer is that the 970 sucks so you should get a 960 instead, because a much slower card and only 2 Gb Vram seems like the answer to such problems ... Based off what other people are doing.

Btw, If you're getting Vram limited with 3.5 Gb at 1080p, try reducing AA or disabling DSR first.

Nvidia lied, that annoys me.

Someone should build up a detailed case and sue them.

[Acerpwns]

I keep reading "You won't have an issue with the vram of a gtx 970 because you'll never use all of it with 1080p gaming". I disagree with this statement. I had a Gigabyte G1 GTX 970 "4gb" and there are in fact some games that use more than 3.5 gb of vram. Whenever I played BF4, there were quite a few maps that ate my vram up quickly. Once I breached 3600+mb of vram being used, my frames took a nose dive. I would go from 100+ fps down to 5-10 and would roller coaster the rest of the match. I'd have to restart the game and join a different server on a different map. Same thing happened with FC4. A friend of mine just bought an EVGA 970 and has been playing Dying Light. He runs a resolution of 1680x1050. His card is using JUST UNDER 3.5gb of vram. So to say that at 1080p you'll be fine, is not completely true. Also, it's insane the number of 970's that have coil whines. I don't understand how this issue hasn't been resolved either. My card had a rather obnoxious whine to it.

I ended up selling my card to someone on Craig's list and am waiting to see what AMD has to offer with this next batch of cards. Keep in mind I'm not biased on cards. I've had cards from both companies and enjoy what they have to offer. I just like a card to have what I'm told it has. Also, when I read about how Nvidia would help gtx 970 users get a refund for their cards, I tried, and quoted what they're PR guy had stated about the refunds. Newegg, Gigabyte, and Nvidia all refused to do it. They kept passing the buck off to the other companies, back and forth. So to those of you who actually get refunds, kudos. I'd like to know what you had to do to pry it out of them.

/rant

I dont have problems at 1080p. Even FC4 Ultra with DSR i get an average of 75fps

[zappian]

Downsampling.

[Briggsy]

No I dont think it works that way. Because when you go beyond the Vram limit the additional info is put into the system ram using shared ram. The last 500 Mb on the 970 is still faster than shared ram. Its delusional to think that a 2 Gb card is going to perform better than a 970 when more than 3.5 Gb vram is needed.

 

It's worth noting that the 3.5GB partition of Ram on a 970 is blocked off for that read/write cycle when the 0.5GB partition is accessed. even though at stock memory clocks the 0.5GB partition has a memory bandwidth of 27.34GB/s (32 / 8 * 7000 / 1024), Windows may decide on a case by case basis whether system Ram is the better option. At times it might make sense to access the last 0.5GB and block off access to the 3.5GB partition, but I have no idea how windows decides that. 

 

As an example, my own system Ram @ 2400Mhz is almost as fast, but with much better latency than the 970's 0.5GB partition. of course I guess the counter argument to that is pci-e 3.0 can't handle more than 2/3's of that bandwidth anyway if windows wants to use the system Ram over the 0.5GB partition.

[ShadowCaptain]

Strange my 3gb 780ti handles BF4 on Ultra at 1440p 60fps and other games too

[Dabombinable]

Strange my 3gb 780ti handles BF4 on Ultra at 1440p 60fps and other games too

Throw Minecraft with Optifine and Shaders at it, then talk about the FPS at 2K windowed.

[R_Golden]

I have never gone over 2gb on battlefield 4 or hard line on my 970 on ultra 1080p.

[TravisTea]

DSR and AA were always off when I had an issue. In fact, I never used it. It was only when I exceeded 3.5gb of vram used. Nothing special to it other than regular in game settings. This occurred with Low, Medium, High, and Ultra settings in BF4. Whether or not you want to buy that it occurs is your call, but there is an issue with the card when it exceeds 3.5gb. I agree that the last 500mb should just be disabled. I think it'd clear out any issues down the road. Until they fix the issue with the vram, and yes I think it is an issue, and they can reduce the amount of cards with obnoxious coil whine, I'll hold off on getting anything from this series from nvidia.

[ablangc]

Probably had 200% scaling or some shit like that.

 

This!

 

I did a test last night with my 980's and was watching my VRAM under certain settings.  Mind you, my resolution is at 2560x1080 and all settings maxed out.  I even disabled SLI just to run these numbers.  Cant remember what map it was but made sure it had the max cap of 64 players.

 

With No AA and 100% scaling: 2.3 GB average usage

With AA Enabled and 100% Scaling 2.7-3.0 GB Average

With no AA and 200% scaling: 3.4 GB

With AA and 200% scaling: 3.9 GB

[TravisTea]

I never used scaling either.. So no DSR, scaling, or AA.. @ 1080p STILL used over 3.5 gb on certain maps.

[Aberu]

I keep reading "You won't have an issue with the vram of a gtx 970 because you'll never use all of it with 1080p gaming". I disagree with this statement. I had a Gigabyte G1 GTX 970 "4gb" and there are in fact some games that use more than 3.5 gb of vram. Whenever I played BF4, there were quite a few maps that ate my vram up quickly. Once I breached 3600+mb of vram being used, my frames took a nose dive. I would go from 100+ fps down to 5-10 and would roller coaster the rest of the match. I'd have to restart the game and join a different server on a different map. Same thing happened with FC4. A friend of mine just bought an EVGA 970 and has been playing Dying Light. He runs a resolution of 1680x1050. His card is using JUST UNDER 3.5gb of vram. So to say that at 1080p you'll be fine, is not completely true. Also, it's insane the number of 970's that have coil whines. I don't understand how this issue hasn't been resolved either. My card had a rather obnoxious whine to it.

 

I ended up selling my card to someone on Craig's list and am waiting to see what AMD has to offer with this next batch of cards. Keep in mind I'm not biased on cards. I've had cards from both companies and enjoy what they have to offer. I just like a card to have what I'm told it has. Also, when I read about how Nvidia would help gtx 970 users get a refund for their cards, I tried, and quoted what they're PR guy had stated about the refunds. Newegg, Gigabyte, and Nvidia all refused to do it. They kept passing the buck off to the other companies, back and forth. So to those of you who actually get refunds, kudos. I'd like to know what you had to do to pry it out of them.

 

/rant 

 

That's strange.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-960,4038-4.html

 

They got 2gb cards to have a minimum of 40 ish fps on ultra detail @ 1080p. There must have been something else the matter with your setup that was causing it.

[SkilledRebuilds]

Some say...'You'll never be able to play the game smoothly anyway at the detail levels that push over 3.5GB vram usage without turning things down to make it playable, thereby not using over 3.5GB anyway"

 

There are also games that maximize vram usage while not really needing to.

 

The latest call of duty, in the cfg file, is set to ONLY use 85% of your vram unless you change it. <-- just an fyi

Say you change it to 100% (1.00), it will use all 4GB of vram, yet to hear of anything bad about the GTX970's 3.5-4.0GB speed degradation and COD's memory management.

 

Curious if someone who has COD:AW and has set 100% vram usage in the cfg, any noticeable cons..?

[TravisTea]

Some say...'You'll never be able to play the game smoothly anyway at the detail levels that push over 3.5GB vram usage without turning things down to make it playable, thereby not using over 3.5GB anyway"

 

There are also games that maximize vram usage while not really needing to.

 

The latest call of duty, in the cfg file, is set to ONLY use 85% of your vram unless you change it. <-- just an fyi

Say you change it to 100% (1.00), it will use all 4GB of vram, yet to hear of anything bad about the GTX970's 3.5-4.0GB speed degradation and COD's memory management.

 

Curious if someone who has COD:AW and has set 100% vram usage in the cfg, any noticeable cons..?

 

Interesting. I'd be curious to see this, as well.

[SkilledRebuilds]

Interesting. I'd be curious to see this, as well.

For those interested... COD defaults to only using 85% of Vram by design.

 

Config file is located:

\Call of Duty Advanced Warfare\players2\config.cfg

one thing I noticed was:

seta r_videoMemoryScale "0.85"

I changed this to

seta r_videoMemoryScale "1"

 

Game WILL use it all, while not needing to.. think of it like Vram caching....or similar <- I'm not 100% on this, but thats what I feel it's doing..

Setting "1" maximized my 270x and my 290's Vram pegged to MAX the entire time playing.