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What happens if you use all of your vram?

FireofDestruction

so i have 2 4GB cards and was recently playing skyrim which i modded a little, 30 ish mods then i added a few more (50 ish) and a few more (80) and out of the total 80 mods i'd say about 20-30 are textures ranging from 2k-4k resolution. Well since i have this many my game has not been running smoothly, and i pondered the question if it was well me using all of my vram since i know high res textures will chew through it like no other. is there a program that monitors vram usage? 

   

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4 minutes ago, FireofDestruction said:

so i have 2 4GB cards and was recently playing skyrim which i modded a little, 30 ish mods then i added a few more (50 ish) and a few more (80) and out of the total 80 mods i'd say about 20-30 are textures ranging from 2k-4k resolution. Well since i have this many my game has not been running smoothly, and i pondered the question if it was well me using all of my vram since i know high res textures will chew through it like no other. is there a program that monitors vram usage? 

msi afterburner

 

and CF doesnt mean that 2 cards will have 8GB Vram.

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8 minutes ago, FireofDestruction said:

 

to answer your title

Spoiler

 

 

 

-sigh- feeling like I'm being too negative lately

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Most programs that display common GPU info, such as clock speed, temperature, etc. will also display VRAM usage. MSI Afterburner, GPU-Z, HWMonitor, etc.

 

Typically being starved for VRAM doesn't look like a flat, consistent FPS drop but rather "hitching" and stuttering when you turn the camera quickly or enter new areas. But sure, I've seen that many mods could eat up nearly 4 GB, so it could be VRAM-related I suppose.

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When you run out of video memory, your system is going to store the "overflowing" data onto your system memory, causing performance to decrease exponentially the more data is overflowing.

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When you use all of your VRAM, the same thing happens as when you use all your normal RAM. The processor (in this case the GPU) doesn't get the data it needs to work with, so performance drops.

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Just now, typographie said:

Most programs that display common GPU info, such as clock speed, temperature, etc. will also display VRAM usage. MSI Afterburner, GPU-Z, HWMonitor, etc.

 

Typically being starved for VRAM doesn't look like a flat, consistent FPS drop but rather "hitching" and stuttering when you turn the camera quickly or enter new areas. But sure, that many mods could easily eat up nearly 4 GB, so it could be VRAM-related I suppose.

what was happening is when i would enter a city like say white run skyrim turned into a meme? and would loop the same image over and over but you could hear people like walking by saying things and i would alt tab out then back again and black screen twas strange indeed i'm not done trouble shooting it yet always open minded about bugs and what not

   

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Well,  in this case,  the gpu has to pull data from the system ram ( several times slower),  which can result in slowdown and stuttering. 

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Usually this will result in stuttering and hickups.

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Results may wary, depending on game.

 

1. The game will stutter until old data is removed from the Vram, and new is loaded.

 

2. The game will load it when it gets it, causing excessive ''pop in'' and lower resolution textures appearing.

 

3. The game will attempt to use the RAM and/or the SSD/HDD as a frame buffer. This usually causes extreme performance loss, as even the fastest DDR4 system memory is unable to keep up with even the slowest GDDR5 memory.

 

A combination of the above? Game crashing? It's much less common than one would think. And there are virtually no tests. Skyrim is pretty much the only game where you can run the game at 60+FPS, while at the same time using in excess of 3GB Vram. In most games, once you reach around 75% Vram usage, you're no longer at 60FPS, so the Vram is not the bottleneck. However, there are some exceptions.

 

It's also important to note, that even if a game is reporting 100% Vram usage. It doesn't mean that it actually needs it. Some games, such as Rise of the Tomb raider holds on to the data and gets rid of it when the space is needed for something else. Whereas games like Witcher 3 seems to get rid of old data as quickly as possible.

 

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