780 v 970 VRAM Question

[roughavoc]

So my 780 died a month ago and MSI are sending me a 970 for a replacement, whilst I am waiting to actually recieve it I have a question I am not sure what the answer would be
 

I am currently running 3440x1440 and was hitting VRAM limits before and will most likely hit them with the new card.

 

With this said, with the 970 having the slower last .5gb of VRAM would this cause a negative impact versus just not having that VRAM to begin with like I had with my 780?

 

My first thoughts would be no, as if I was going over VRAM limits on my 780 I would either just be reloading the textures on the fly to stay within the 3GB limit and therefore reducing FPS or using system RAM which is slower than the last part of the 970 VRAM anyway whereas with the 970 I will gain .5GB of fast VRAM and then have semi-slow .5GB before it would reload / use system RAM.
 

[Enderman]

no its better to have slow vram than no vram

 

because the "slow" vram still runs at like 28GBps or something around there

that's still way faster than your system ram which the game would use instead

[don_svetlio]

Maybe - the VRAM on the 970 prevents caching in SYS RAM so it essentially removes the ability to cache certain stuff in SYS RAM and it attempts to cache them in that RAM but it's still slow

[roughavoc]

1 minute ago, Enderman said:

no its better to have slow vram than no vram

 

because the "slow" vram still runs at like 28GBps or something around there

that's still way faster than your system ram which the game would use instead

Okay, just as I thought. Nice to have others chime in!

Either way if it causes more problems or not there is nothing I can do about it anyway as I am not going to purchase a new GPU

[sapphirethunder]

That 0.5Gb of slower VRAM has never been a problem to me with my MSI Gaming 4G GTX 970.

So you will be fine.

 

People hugely like to over-exaggerate the effect of that slower partition of the VRAM.

[Enderman]

1 minute ago, roughavoc said:

Okay, just as I thought. Nice to have others chime in!

Either way if it causes more problems or not there is nothing I can do about it anyway as I am not going to purchase a new GPU

970 is quite a bit better than a 780 so i doubt you will have any performance problems  

[Shahnewaz]

Probably. There is no guarantee that your game will run just fine or not, so you'll have to verify with others' experiences with games.

 

The 0.5GB segment is still faster than your average DDR3 1600MHz memory. However, the solution lies in how your GPU will handle your segmented memory. if it decides to store some information in the slower memory, and your game engine immediately decides to use them in rendering, then you should see an immediate FPS drop and/or stutter. In other words, the slower memory should always be populated with less critical, and less frequently demanded data to ensure optimal performance.

 

It's really a game of smart memory management that I believe Nvidia does on a driver level to ensure the slower memory doesn't hold back the entire card.

 

But does it mean that the 4GB segmented memory is just as good as a 4GB non-segmented memory? Of course not! It's not equal per se, but I believe the memory management should bring it very close to the performance of non-segmented memory.