Why launch the 960 Ti with 2GB of ram?

[KarateHottie93]

I really hope the reports of it having only 2GB's are not true. It makes no sense at all when you consider that you can get 4GB 960's.

I have been hugely opposed to cards having low VRAM since the days when most didn't even care about how much their card had. I've owned too many great cards for their day that got junked way too early simply because their low memory couldn't keep up.

My SLI 9800's from back in the day with 512 MB's are the perfect example. It also became an issue in the past year with my two 780 Ti's that I recently managed to sell while they still had some value.

I get that they have to make it so people will need to upgrade sooner than later but to put only 2GB VRAM on a card of it's class in 2016 is insulting. Good thing the 380X exists.

Also please don't feed me the line that "It's a budget card and can't even use more than 2GB's". It can. The 4GB standard 960 uses every bit of it under some circumstances.

[arnavvr]

I really hope the reports of it having only 2GB's are not true. It makes no sense at all when you consider that you can get 4GB 960's.

I have been hugely opposed to cards having low VRAM since the days when most didn't even care about how much their card had. I've owned too many great cards for their day that got junked way too early simply because their low memory couldn't keep up.

My SLI 9800's from back in the day with 512 MB's are the perfect example. It also became an issue in the past year with my two 780 Ti's that I recently managed to sell while they still had some value.

I get that they have to make it so people will need to upgrade sooner than later but to put only 2GB VRAM on a card of it's class in 2016 is insulting. Good thing the 380X exists.

Also please don't feed me the line that "It's a budget card and can't even use more than 2GB's". It can. The 4GB standard 960 uses every bit of it under some circumstances.

 

Another perfect example is my GTX 580. Beast card, but 1.5GB VRAM.

[KarateHottie93]

Another perfect example is my GTX 580. Beast card, but 1.5GB VRAM.

Yup exactly. Really sad scenario but far too common.

[Sam Z Man]

But if you put less vram on the card they have to upgrade sooner.

[Aytex]

Yup exactly. Really sad scenario but far too common.

[KarateHottie93]

Yup exactly. Really sad scenario but far too common.

Lol can't tell if sarcastic or really serious.

It was acceptable with my 9800's and 780 Ti's cause their VRAM at the time was very adequate and it's demand wasn't increasing at even near the insane rate it is now. There is a difference in marketing and blatantly ripping off the target audience for this kind of card, which is likely new builders who don't know all the details but want Ultra 1080P.

This card will be one of the fastest junked cards ever made if it only has 2GB. It's just wrong to sell it with so little.

[fehllyy]

this would be pretty dumb of Nvidia to do this. Seeing that they released the GTX 960 with 4Gb of memory, it would make sense to launch the 960 Ti with 4Gb of RAM on the release.

 

 when they release the 960 Ti with 2Gb of V-RAM:

[Monkey Dust]

Is this confirmed? Seems like a curious choice, it will get slayed in some benchmarks even compared to the 4GB vanilla 960. Though I guess not everyone looks at benchmarks before blowing their hard earned.

[Guest]

Is there an official 960Ti thread somewhere? 

 

edit - I thought a site said 3 GB of VRAM, but I could be wrong, knowing Nvidia it could just be 2.5GB of VRAM ay lmao... no but seriously though this should be an interesting card either way, I'll be excited for the benchmarks and stock specs 

[don_svetlio]

It's marketing by Nvidia - every one of their cards aside from the Titans are VRAM starved so that you can upgrade to a newer card

[BrightCandle]

Games target hardware that exists, no one makes software that does not run on hardware people have. Doesn't work like that and its a really bad business strategy! You can't obviously sell software for hardware that does not exist.

 

So instead the way games are developed is target the hardware that the GPU companies make and which are common. The 960 is probably the most common card of the series and 99 out of a 100 buyers bought the 2GB VRAM model. So the games developers when targeting their game to hardware will target that card and its actual release specs with a particular combination of settings, they will try to max out all the aspects of that card with their settings. Maybe the ultra settings will target something like a Titan or even a card that doesn't yet exist but they always target hardware people have. So what you will find is that the compute/tesselation/fixed function performance will be matched with texture and model quality for a given card and if you give yours more VRAM you might get lucky sometimes and be able to boost the object model detail or the texture a bump but more often than not the performance of the card as a whole will bring it below the ideal frame rate.

 

With Nvidia making up 80% of the GPU market their levels of tessellation/VRAM drive the development so historically AMDs high VRAM has gone to waste most of the time. It also didn't afford the cards any longer life because the performance impact on other aspects also increase with VRAM usage (because they target the lowest of the features of all the cards really, one reason why most games have lower quality tesselation) so the end result was you spent money on getting VRAM and where rarely able to use it. You will find circumstances, mostly around texture quality, where the performance cost is pretty low and so sometimes that setting can be increased without a frame rate hit but otherwise its normally not that important.

 

Nvidia (and AMD) choose VRAM based on the cost not "how much is needed" because it doesn't work that way, its exactly the opposite way around. Nvidia/AMD makes it and the developers make games that run on that hardware, it doesn't work the way you think it does.

[don_svetlio]

Games target hardware that exists, no one makes software that does not run on hardware people have. Doesn't work like that and its a really bad business strategy! You can't obviously sell software for hardware that does not exist.

 

So instead the way games are developed is target the hardware that the GPU companies make and which are common. The 960 is probably the most common card of the series and 99 out of a 100 buyers bought the 2GB VRAM model. So the games developers when targeting their game to hardware will target that card and its actual release specs with a particular combination of settings, they will try to max out all the aspects of that card with their settings. Maybe the ultra settings will target something like a Titan or even a card that doesn't yet exist but they always target hardware people have. So what you will find is that the compute/tesselation/fixed function performance will be matched with texture and model quality for a given card and if you give yours more VRAM you might get lucky sometimes and be able to boost the object model detail or the texture a bump but more often than not the performance of the card as a whole will bring it below the ideal frame rate.

 

With Nvidia making up 80% of the GPU market their levels of tessellation/VRAM drive the development so historically AMDs high VRAM has gone to waste most of the time. It also didn't afford the cards any longer life because the performance impact on other aspects also increase with VRAM usage (because they target the lowest of the features of all the cards really, one reason why most games have lower quality tesselation) so the end result was you spent money on getting VRAM and where rarely able to use it. You will find circumstances, mostly around texture quality, where the performance cost is pretty low and so sometimes that setting can be increased without a frame rate hit but otherwise its normally not that important.

 

Nvidia (and AMD) choose VRAM based on the cost not "how much is needed" because it doesn't work that way, its exactly the opposite way around. Nvidia/AMD makes it and the developers make games that run on that hardware, it doesn't work the way you think it does.

explain to me then why people with 680s can't get as good settings with 2GB of VRAM compared to 7970 owners who are still fine with their cards? Or why 780 Ti owners are selling their cards even though they are capable and going for R9 390s/390Xs? Want an aswer? Nvidia cards are VRAM-starved. Always have been

[PlayStation 2]

this would be pretty dumb of Nvidia to do this. Seeing that they released the GTX 960 with 4Gb of memory, it would make sense to launch the 960 Ti with 4Gb of RAM on the release.

 

 when they release the 960 Ti with 2Gb of V-RAM:

This. Or at the very least, 3GB of memory. It seems really fucking stupid on Nvidia's part to make a card that's worse than the 380X in the part that matters most in this case.

 

It's marketing by Nvidia - every one of their cards aside from the Titans are VRAM starved so that you can upgrade to a newer card

this too

[panwala95]

I feel nvidia thinks that a native 4gb gtx 960 ti might eat into the gtx 970s market it having 3.5 GB of vram and all....