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Originally Posted by SEE
1. Is CloD one of the exceptional tiltles that requires more than 1Gb even for a modest resolution and why?
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No. VRAM usage is increasing with many newer games, particularly with more games using tessellation and advanced shader routines.
The thing with VRAM is that its where the developer wants all the scene assets to live, because it's traditionally the fastest RAM on a PC, also DirectX has "direct" access to it. So what the devs do, assuming they use Direct X routines, is load all the 3D models, Textures etc into that memory space and do all the pixel, vertex and tessellation processing on those assets in that memory space.
Remember the actual buffers that hold the final image are fairly small, for example:
1920 x 1080 = 2073600 pixels
2073600 pixels x 32bit pixel (RGBA 8bit each colour) = 8MB (roughly)
DirectX default buffering is double = 16MB of VRAM space
It's all the scene assets that take up the majority of space.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SEE
2. There seems to be an industry practice of using identical chipsets but by disabling or changing a peformance parameter (i.e No of shaders, reducing clock speeds, etc) marketing a budget version. I.e a Nvidea GTX 2GB 560 is slightly cheaper than the 560ti version yet bench tests show only a 5% reduction in performance across the most demanding games which can be adressed by oc'ing. Would someone looking to upgrade on a budget be better going for the better chipset with lower RAM or the budget version with more RAM?
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This is no different to how CPUs are badged and priced. It may surprise you that your 560 GPU would most likely have come from the same silicon wafer that produced a 580 chip. The difference is the 560 chip may not have performed to meet the 580 specs so the factory would have locked down the clocks, the number of shader units etc etc and made it a 560.
The performance gains from having extra VRAM memory is more than likely having enough space to store assets and preventing scene assets from being copied over to system ram. I've only dabbled in rendering and animating basic 3D objects in Direct X but there's a
lot of stuff happening in background that needs to be appreciated.