Does the GTX 970's 500MB slow down modern games?

[KezzaMcFezza]

As most of you guys know the GTX 970 has 3.5GB of fast ram and 500MB or slower ram. But my question is does it actually affect real world performance? in games like GTA 5 where i'm always going past the 3.5GB mark.

(i notice alot of stuttering in GTA 5 but i think its mt 8GB ram issue which i have ordered 16GB ram) but i am wondering is it actually the last 500MB or system ram slowing my game down?

 

Thanks in advance

[sapphirethunder]

I have never had any kind of slow downs with my GTX 970.

The whole 0.5Gb memory segmentation is just highly over-exaggerated in how it affects stuff.

 

In reality it does nothing.

[KezzaMcFezza]

Just now, sapphirethunder said:

I have never had any kind of slow downs with my GTX 970.

The whole 0.5Gb memory segmentation is just highly over-exaggerated in how it affects stuff.

 

In reality it does nothing.

Okay, thanks!

[PlayStation 2]

1 minute ago, sapphirethunder said:

I have never had any kind of slow downs with my GTX 970.

The whole 0.5Gb memory segmentation is just highly over-exaggerated in how it affects stuff.

 

In reality it does nothing.

This.

The issue at hand has only been proven in very controlled and specific scenarios.

[Lewellyn]

No, not unless you're pushing it. 

 

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/198223-investigating-the-gtx-970-does-nvidias-penultimate-gpu-have-a-memory-problem

 

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-nvidia-geforce-gtx-970-revisited

 

http://techreport.com/blog/28800/how-much-video-memory-is-enough

[Quinnbeast]

I have a few games that creep into the upper end of the 970s VRAM size (3.6 - 3.7GB) if I have the settings cranked up, and honestly, if the internet hadn't in fact gone ape-shit over 3.5-Gate, I wouldn't have known the issue existed. That's not a very technical response of course, but it's the only one that matters to me personally 

[Hero7750]

Not unless you're trying to do 4k

[SteveGrabowski0]

It really takes a monster load to make two 970s in SLI crash and burn where two 980s in SLI wouldn't due the difference in memory subsystems. Otherwise the 970 performs as a slower 980. Believe me, I was pissed and ready to return my 970 once the gimped vram was exposed in January 2015, but the benchmarking done by Digital Foundry and pcper where they actively targeted this slower vram showed it wasn't a problem except in really extreme scenarios that I could never hope to run properly on a 970 or even two anyways.

 

 

[SteveGrabowski0]

I think GTA V had a nasty memory leak, but even on 8 GB system RAM I never had stutters related to it. But it could use 5-6 GB of my then 8GB of system RAM after playing for a couple of hours. Are you turning the advanced settings up and running with lots of MSAA? A 970 can't handle all that. Ultra grass is another performance killer, Very High runs well though.

[othertomperson]

26 minutes ago, Hero7750 said:

Not unless you're trying to do 4k

Speaking as someone who uses 970 SLI for 4K, even then I haven't noticed any effect.

[Hero7750]

23 hours ago, othertomperson said:

Speaking as someone who uses 970 SLI for 4K, even then I haven't noticed any effect.

Thats cause you have SLI

[Midnitewarrior4]

1 hour ago, Hero7750 said:

Thats cause you have SLI

sli doesnt double vram... if you have two 4gb cards in sli you still have 4gb.. so he still has 3.5 gb of vram with the slower 500mb, no different then single card

[BrightCandle]

The RAM itself is much slower, but the impact on actual games has been really quite minimal. Some of the tests done at the time when this was found out did manage to find some settings that exposed a variance in performance that wasn't there on the 980s and hence due to the VRAM but in practice those settings were outside of the bounds of the performance of the 970 anyway. Its a bit more apparent on SLI however or rather its easier to approach the point where there is more frame variance due to using that slow VRAM but its actually kind of a rare circumstance because not all that many games actually use that amount of VRAM to begin with.

[othertomperson]

1 hour ago, Hero7750 said:

Thats cause you have SLI

Actually if there were an issue SLI would highlight it. A single 970 at 4K would perform so badly that any vram issue would be obfuscated by poor GPU performance. Removing the GPU as a potential bottleneck would bring any vram issues to the forefront. Really, the GPU is still the bottleneck. I'm sure if you tried to run at 5K or 8K you could well find that slower 0.5GB to be something of an issue, but by then your GPUs are also going to be struggling hugely. I'd imagine this is why Nvidia didn't think splitting the vram on a card of this tier was a particularly big issue.