How Much Video Memory Is Needed For Higher Resolutions? (Techreport)

[Deletive]

actually maxwell manages memory much better then even R9 fury 

As you can see, the color compression in Nvidia's Maxwell chips looks to be quite a bit more effective than the compression in Fury X. The Fury X still has a tremendous amount of memory bandwidth, of course, but we're more concerned about capacity. Assuming these GPUs store compressed data in a packed format that saves capacity as well as bandwidth, it's possible the Maxwell GPUs could be getting more out of each megabyte by using stronger compression.

Well, it's still more then GCN 1.0, maxwell I believe has more L2 cache for it's SM's and just overall much better memory optimizations as you mentioned. 

[Bittenfleax]

lol

[Yoinkerman]

Why aren't they comparing a 2gb 960 with a 4gb 960 and a 4gb 290x with a 8gb 290x and comparable cards.

All those charts really show is your fps goes down at higher resolutions.

[Linus_torvalds]

Why aren't they comparing a 2gb 960 with a 4gb 960 and a 4gb 290x with a 8gb 290x and comparable cards.

All those charts really show is your fps goes down at higher resolutions.

There is no need in observing the same cards with different amount of VRAM, just observing not so different cards (290x and 390x are basically the same there is a little difference in frequency) with different amount of VRAM is enough. You can clearly see what's going on when looking into 4 GB R9 290x vs 8 GB R9 390x benchmarks. Fps degradation should be the same on different cards with no memory bandwith limitation, until one of them runs out of VRAM. You can see this in this picture. When 4 GB is not enough for R9 290x it's performance becomes worse then expected.  If not 4 GB limit it's graph should have been at 8-9 FPS point at 33 Mpixel resolutions.

[Yoinkerman]

Maybe at best.  It's definitely not cut and dried.