VRAM Usage - 6970 (2 GB) vs. GTX 580 (1,5 GB) vs. GTX 580 (3 GB)
 

Hey guys,

What is the max. amount of VRAM CloD uses atm if the GFX card has enough?
And what will give the most performance?
I will chose my GFX card according to this.

Does it use ...
> 2 GB or close to --> GTX 580 (3 GB)
> 1,5 GB or close to --> Ati 6970 (2 GB)
< 1,5 GB --> GTX 580 (1,5 GB)

download rivatuner and set up real time monitoring and find out for yourself?

at medium settings spawning into the london sight seeing and flying around a bit has me at about 950-970mb out of a max of 1024mb.

My advice is to wait for the next patch before purchasing. I don't think (?) anyone has seen a max yet (i.e. GPU memory that is not utilised) - I certainly don't with the 1.5 Gb on my GTX480.

doesn't make any sense for me 'cause I want to play the game on high to full settings and I am sure that my current card (GTX 285 1GB) first of all has not enough VRAM and secondly doesn't have enough computing power.

It would be great if the people that have a 2 GB card could test how much of VRAM is used on maxed out settings and 1920x1080.

But thanks madrebel for your numbers.

hold on lemme change some stuff to high and see if it maxes out.

Check this thread.

Hm, settings on medium, doesn't tell that much.

switched to ultra settings with shadows, grass, and roads unchecked. at 1000 feet or so it was using 970mb. once i got real low over buckingham pallace it spiked to just over 1gb.

enabling AA or AAF would likely spike/peg the memory at 1024mbs. lets try that next.

with 2x AA i am 980-1gb ram. however what is more interesting here is my GPU is only averaging 45-55% utilization. this points to a fairly significant CPU bottlneck which likely should be somewhat cleared up when they fix multi core support. when one core is doing nothing but rendering frames and the other core is doing all the simulation stuff GPU utilizaton should increase.

gunna try AF settings now, will take a few minutes as i have to do that via nvidia control panel.

What is your card? My 480 is maxed.

2xAA and 2xAF still only using 980-1gb ram. the game is likely reserving a small amount of the GPU memory space.

performance wasn't any better or worse with these settings enabled/disabled. also, performance from medium to ultra didnt change for me either.

again, this points to a cpu bottlneck not a gpu bottleneck.

my system is:
c2d e7200 @ 3.2ghz
4gb ddr2 @ 1066mhz
gtx460se @ 850mhz core/1700mhz shader 1990mhz ram clock

gives me about 10fps average low over london with ultra settings except seizure filter, grass, shadows, and roads unchecked with irror disabled.

again ram utilization hovers between 980-1010.

I think the game is GPU-limited. I am getting playable framerate with settings low enough and some tweaks. See this thread, post #11.

my tests suggest otherwise

http://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s..._22_20_121.png
http://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s..._22_32_847.png

note the GPU% in the upper right. sitting at half utilization suggests the gpu isn't being fed fast enough. this would explain why luthier says the multicore improvements offer a large boost to performance.

Apologies - I have just checked and my GPU usage drops from 99% to ~50% in low flight over London, presumably as the CPU struggles to deal with all the buildings. Bring on the patch!

exactly. my guess is sound, IO/object handling, network, physics, etc are all going to be run on one core while the raw (pre)rendering and scene setup will be handled by another core.

this should both increase raw fps and decrease microstutters as one core is likely going to manage all the loading to from ram/disk while the other just churns out frames.

im actually a bit more optimistic after this round of testing. if the multicore patch does what it should do then IMO the game will be running pretty darn fantastically especially since this patch will likely follow the improved buildings patch.

i remain vigilantly skeptical until the patches are in and things improve greatly though.

It surely has to do with the dreaded draw calls, amd guy talked about it days ago, crappy console hardware can easily outdo the fastest gpu on the market, due to api overhead.

"
On consoles, you can draw maybe 10,000 or 20,000 chunks of geometry in a frame, and you can do that at 30-60fps. On a PC, you can't typically draw more than 2-3,000 without getting into trouble with performance, and that's quite surprising - the PC can actually show you only a tenth of the performance if you need a separate batch for each draw call.

"

link: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/gra...l-to-directx/1

I think that is pretty consistent, gpu usage doesn't reveal exactly which part of the gpu isn't being used, but i bet that a lot of overhead without actual rendering is part of the issue.
Of course i'm not trying to imply that i exactly know what is going on with this particular engine, but i think we all agree that the newest hardware should manage much more on CoD, so let see if developers manage to tame the beast and make the gpu spit some pixels.

Just get the maximum you can , the graphics will only get better from here anyway. Never mind if the card isn't being utilized to the full , it will be with further updates. 6990's have 4GB of memory , but for the price i'm looking at the 6970's.

this isn't exactly accurate. the 6990 has 2 gpus each with a 2gb frame buffer. those don't combine to equal 4gbs those are two separate 2gb buffers.

further until sli/crossfire works in cod there is no point to the 590 or 6990 or any multi gpu setup for that matter.

The 6990 is a great card but with pathetic cooling, search Youtube, you won't be able to hear anything with the fan runnning. Wait for Gigabyte etc to release tri-fan 6990, Or better look at GTX 590 .

ok, 2 GPUS won't improve VRAM but doubling GPUS surely will

He111.

Hi all,

New to these forums. DL'ing the game now (Steam).

Just a (probably silly) suggestion, but has anyone gone into task manager and set the CoD process priority to high and the affinity to force all CPU cores used?

I doubt this will change anything, though I have had some success in the passed on previous games.

Andrew,

1.2gb free flight over London - see attached screenshot - PS loads showing zero as I had to go back to desktop for screenshot - in game 99% GPU load on 1st GPU - 2nd idle (SLI not working - as we already know)

thanks, interesting

There was only one guy I saw using a 3GB 580. And he is the only one capable of getting "40 FPS in the dreaded bombers-over-London mission" (settings on medium and high; 1920X1200 resolution). He says it runs silky smooth.

Here is the thread:

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.ph...3256483/1.html

The game will use up all available VRAM:

http://img22.imageshack.us/img22/7258/142zk.jpg

So, for me the choice is obvious. :)

It won't. Not sure about CF and ATI cards, but with Nvidia and SLI even when you pair the two cards in SLI - you get the maximum amount of VRAM of a single card - it does not double up!

The common mistake nowadays is that dual GPU cards are the solution. They aren't. Dual GPU cards = CF or SLI "on a stick", with much worse cooling / loudness / chance to crap out on you.

If crossfire is supported i think it uses whole cf card memory, i have 5970 2mb

If it not supported it uses half, why even put 2gb if allways only half is used?

Kankkis

That 5970 doesn't help you a lot. Even when CF starts to become supported - you will still have 1GB of VRAM at your disposal. It will run "twice as fast" but you won't have twice as much of VRAM.

As if you're running 2 x 1GB cards. Their total amount is 2GB, but this accounts for speed only. You might as well have an Nvidia card with 1GB or VRAM right now.

This is why single GPU cards have the advantage here with CoD. 6970 2GB and 580 3GB are currently the best cards you can get for CoD.

Nah, I have seen picture from someone with a 5970 from the setup from ROF, he had 2 gig memory which he could use.

I don't know for sure, but dual GPU cards might have their memory shared (like in they both can access it all, so the data can be loaded through all memory, not separated for each GPU in its own memory). I need to check this.

yet, I would say do not buy no new hardware at least 1 month from now on. there's no point in doing it without knowing the engine's behavior after the few initial optimization patches.

I am certain that in SLI your memory doesn't double up.

That is the best advice right there.

If i put max graphics setting on rof it shows 51% video memory usage, so there is must be more than 1mb then.

Kankkis

what;s your setting mate? SLI with how much vram on each card? Can you do an AIDA test, please?

That screen shows a GTX 460 and the game uses around 1GB maybe due to the 1GB GFX card. I should ask the 3GB guy to make such test.

that's exactly what i've asked on the other thread too: we really need someone with a single GPU card with 1.5/2/3 GB VRAM do an AIDA test on IL2 CoD on variou graphics settings.

There a lot of confusion in this thread about how SLI/Crossfire work.

SLI/Crossfire cards and systems dont share VRAM between GPUs.

So the effective VRAM of a dual GPU with 2 GB is what is assigned to a one GPU.

That mean that in a dual GPU card with 2 GB of VRAM there a 1 GB of effective VRAM becouse, in fact this card are two single cards of 1 GB VRAM.

Vram makes a huge difference in ROF. (I figure this is the closest sim to COD at the moment) In the ROF setup panel it will tell you how much memory you use as you put in your settings. (And checking with MSI Afterburner it is right on the money) With everything set to max 8x Antializing and 8x Anisotropic and all other sttings to the max level I use 56% of my available vram and that is on a 2 gig geforce 560Ti card. All flights are over land and it is really good graphics in this flight sim. ( I get low 40s to high 50s fps with no shutters by the way). Gogamer has April 18th for my shipment date. I have second day air and I will find out then how it does on a 2 gig card. I am not in any hurry as I only had ROF for a couple of months and have been having a blast with it.

When I did get my card I decided to go with the most Vram that I could get on my series of card.......I figured it could never hurt to have it even if I did not need it. And boy I am glad I got it !!!

Is true that this game is VRAM demanding but Im playing fine with 1 GB of VRAM.

But i guess that the players with 512 VRAM will have problems, the best way to free up VRAM is shoot down AA.

Like wise in ROF. It doesnt take a 2 gig card to run the sim.....however if you want to run it will all the bells and whistles turned on....then you need more than 1 gig, 1.5 at least.

I was saying that DUAL GPU (590 GTX & 6990) cards might have their VRAM shared. We need to check the vendor's specifications for that.

No mem is shared, is duplicated, dual gpu cards are the same like one gpu card with crossfire/sli conection inside the card.

True, that's the reason why my game is sturrering like hell, i got 5970 2gb but really it uses only 1gb, there is people who's getting allmost smooth gameplay with over 1gb.

Weird thing is that even i play all setting about min, i got stuttering and my hd loading, how the hell game can use so much vram even low detail?

Kankkis

SLI stands for Scan Line Interleaving...

Simply put if you have two cards in sli, one card does the top part of the screen and the other does the rest. Logically this means that the two memories must have ALL the information in each.

Double cards are a compact SLI package, that is all.

Louis

yes, but that doesn't mean they can't have both GPU accessing the whole memory (as the memory is on the same card, the accesing speed should be faster than accessing the other GPU's memory via a SLI link).

is highly improbable, but as none of us really knows the way the hardware of dual GPU works, we can't have a say in this.

that's why I said we need to dig this up.

Each GPU maintains it's own frame buffer, rendering data is duplicated in each frame buffer. VRAM is not pooled.

Yeah but the GPU should not be goign at 99 percent the whole time. I have a GTX 580 GPU and it stays pegged at 99 percent the WHOLE time the game is running and it has almost fried my card several times with temps close to 100 degrees celcius.

no this is what sli used to stand for. sli now = scalable link interface.

I can not find any program to monitor vram usage of an ATI card. MSI Afterburner, GPU-Z do not show it for an ATI. Any suggestions?

try AIDA64, as the others did in the other thread.

Edit: beaten to it!

yes it does you just have to setup realtime monitoring.

evga precision and msi afterburner are just different versions of rivatuner.

here is a link
http://www.vgaforum.com/showthread.p...nitoring-Guide

or just google rivatuner monitoring guide and figure it out from there. it isn't terribly difficult.

if you want to get real fancy then you can setup a profile that sets the clocks to default when no 3d apps are running and another profile to apply an overclocked profile when a 3d app is running and have them apply automagically.

*edit* the pics i posted on page 2 show in the upper right hand what real time monitoring looks like. it puts an overlay on the screen when a game is running. you can change that position around too if you like. you can also change the color too.

That's not entirely true. It depends on how the developer has set up the buffers in DirectX. While yes they physically don't share memory, but with DirectX you can map the memory to appear as one huge chunk.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...=vs.85%29.aspx

no, you can't. each GPU has X memory. gpu1 can't access gpu2's memory. if GPU2 even wanted to access GPU1's buffer then this would slow down the frame draw process which is why it isn't done.

I know. I was replying to Buchon's comment about VRam and System Ram.

The best way for SLI is split rendering half the screen and the other for the other half..

Split work better no matter what .. NVIDIA profile now do not have this option but i tried all and it's still better for high textured sim

Split frame doesn't share the load evenly, there's no perfect method, you can easily have one half having a huge HDR/shading workload and the other half showing the floor.

On topic: It looks clear in luthier statements that the engine need resource optimizing (should improve memory use), and more fine threading, because the same thread that renders, needs to load finer textures when you'r close to ground, hence horrible stutter you all see.

As far as I know rivatuner is supposed to be used with nVidia cards. Do you manage to use it to monitor ATI memory usage?

it can be used with ati GPUs as of the 8500 series. i would recommend using evga's precision. you dont need an evga card to use it. i like it over the MSI version ... its just a UI thing they are both functionally equivelent.

GTX 570 1280MB VRAM used up at 1680*1050 ultra high setting on London.
Any guys have 2G VRAM tested it?

I dont think AA or AF have much effect on memory those are more calculation based.. Resolution and such drive memory more. Higher resolution the bigger the ram usage

AF maybe, but AA has a great impact in the memory needed, specially at high resolution, it's like going extra resolution (in the case of 4xsupersample, like 4 times, but in msaa this is greatly reduced)

Sapphire 6950 2gig VRAm here... London was 10 fps on everything maxed

BUT... I have a shit CPU (although everyones CPU is not being utilized to their full potential atm) a Dual core Athlon 3.2ghz even with affinity mask...

Over land I get about 40 to 50 fps with everything high but no forest and med buildings

Over the channel 50-60 fps

shit motherboard too by the way...

I upgraded from Nvidia GTX 260 fyi It's a great card too. If the game was optimized I think the 260 could have made me happy with everything Medium and models high...

this is setup picture from someone with 5970 (2 gig memory), when i use same settings (with my 1 gig memory card) you see video memory usage over 100%, and he's only using 51% of his memory (its says on picture below) which means he does got 2 gig video memory?

And why would ATI sell that card saying it has 2 gig when you only can use 1 gig anyways?


http://www.plaatjesupload.nl/bekijk/...3019768300.jpg

@Slechtvalk

The HD5970 is a duel GPU card. Each GPU is assigned 1Gb of RAM.

I can confirm that CoD does not invoke the second GPU. Hopefully the upcoming patches will resolve this.

I have 5970 2gb too and same 51%

But this is truth, games only use that 1gb, maybe rof laucher see that 2gb wrong way, my rof is totally smooth with full settings.

But why as you see on picture I posted his memory usage is only 51% (with his 5970 card) while my 1 gig card with same settings is using over 100% video memory?

What does GPU-Z says when you run a(nother) game? In second tab it will show how much video ram is used.
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads...-Z_v0.5.2.html

That s good question, i don't know, i think because windows see it 2gb that's the reason, but im sure games uses only 1gb memory, i mean they uses 2gb but there is both memorys with same data, working likely somehow that RAID hdd's, so if faster that way.

Kankkis

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/...b_performance/

The Radeon HD 5970 is AMD’s "fastest" video card. This is not a single-GPU video card like the Radeon HD 5870. The Radeon HD 5970 video card consists of two Radeon HD 5870 (down-clocked) GPUs connected via CrossFireX on a single board. While both GPUs retain all the specifications internally as a Radeon HD 5870, the performance has been reduced by core frequency reduction and memory frequency reduction. But worth mentioning is that many people find the 5970 very easy to overclock by large margins. There is also only 1GB of GDDR5 available per GPU. This memory video RAM limitation can cause high resolutions with antialiasing to run out of local video memory, since memory is not shared on the video card. Each GPU needs its own frame buffer space. The only way to fix this issue is to use more memory per GPU, but the 5970 doesn't have it.

In our evaluation of the GeForce GTX 580 last week, we did not compare it to the Radeon HD 5970. The reason being is that pricing on the 5970 was higher when we began the evaluation process by a full $160. The 5970 ended up being directly comparable to the GTX 580's pricing towards the end of our process. The GeForce GTX 580 is currently going for $499 online. The Radeon HD 5970 can be had now for $469.99 after $30 MIR. This is an excellent deal compared to past pricing, and we wanted to see how performance stacks up against the new GTX 580.

I don't think they're planning to address SLI in this patch. I think it's another month or two.

Really? What happened with the 6990?

eVGA Precision here, was indicating 800 ~ 900Mb on a 460 1024Mb. Curiously, it was showing that number for both my 460's (SLI)

:) it's really new card, article is older

Just tried a quick flight around London in a spit, max settings apart from in game AA, and with a GTX580 it appears to be using as much VRAM as it can grab hold of - started the flight at ~1420Mb, and crept up to ~1500Mb. It was a quick test, so I didn't check framerate or anything. I do have the "noSSAO" mod running, as well as a RAM drive setup - the flight was pretty smooth throughout, but there are still obvious stutters.

There's a particular set of fuel containers close to the shore on one of the bends of the Thames that when you shoot it it flattens buildings around it for a good few 100 meters - that really brings the fps down to a slideshow for a minute or so.

Specs, for those who want to know;

i920 @ 4Ghz
24Gb 1600MHz 9-9-9-25 2T
6Gb RAM drive with steam/CoD installation & 6Gb fancy cache
GTX580 1536Mb @ Stock

Trees and buildings still cause stutters, and for a decent flight while minimising (I've not had a completely stutter free flight, even on lowest settings) the stutters, I go for all max except buildings and trees on medium.

BTW, Triggaaar? Same Trig from clunk.org.uk?

put buildings on unlimited and do the test again :)