Why GFX card with more RAM?

[SEE]

To help others and myself, maybe someone with technical understanding can help others and I regards the selection of GFX cards and the question of on board RAM. Please, could posters consider the future optimisation of the engine rather than its current format.

(Maybe the mods will leave this in the general forum before transferring the thread to Technical.)

Most of the reviews regards 2gb v 1GB seem to suggest that the benefits are mainly seen when using Higher Resolutions than 1920 x 1080 and very few gaming titles benefit from more on board Ram than a typical 1GB.

1. Is CloD one of the exceptional tiltles that requires more than 1Gb even for a modest resolution and why?

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?

Well its hard to tell in truth, but i would imagine that when or if the game is optimised correctly GPU's with 1GB of Ram should be able to run happily. As it stands at the moment the game is in a state where you really need all the power you can muster to get it to perform, that said it still as stutters and FPS drop even with the most powerful rigs.

[JG52Uther]

2GB cards perform much better in BF3 than 1GB cards apparently, so its not just CoD, but more game titles will go that way.
I remember playing il2 on a nvidea mx440 GFX card that had what, about 128mb memory.
You can now get 4GB graphics cards...

[SEE]

Thanks Tree and JG, from that I guess that the answer to Q2 is get the best 1GB rather than a slightly dumbed down but cheaper chipset with 2Gb based on future optimisation of the current engine.

[Ataros]

Originally Posted by SEE

1. Is CloD one of the exceptional tiltles that requires more than 1Gb even for a modest resolution and why?

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?

1. CloD has probably one of the highest visibility ranges multiplied by the highest texture details in gaming history multiplied by extreme number of texture surfaces. This is a next-gen game. That is why next-gen videocards come with 3GB vram (e.g. HD7970).

As I mentioned in another thread

Originally Posted by Ataros

From my experience with ArmA2 visibility distance can bring any hardware to its knees. Most of the servers limit it to 3-4 km only to provide decent FPS while game allows 10 km max. And this is a 2 year-old game.

What is the visibility distance in CloD? When visibility radius is increased amount of required CPU and GPU calculations grows exponentially. This is a big issue.

It is not supposed to run well on a 1GB card in resolutions higher than 1400x900 according to my estimates.

2. Better chipset is faster than more ram in general unless you run resolution higher than full HD. E.g. imo gtx580 3gb > gtx580 1.5gb > gtx560 2gb. Not sure how to rank gtx570 2.5gb.

However when I bought a cheap $200 video card 2 years ago I went for 2 gb version because extra 1 gb costed only about $20-30 and I am glad I did it since it runs CloD reasonably well after system optimisation. I am saving cash to get a 3GB version of gtx580 or hd7970 or hd7950 for BoM depending on their price/performance ratio and possible driver bugs.

[SEE]

Wow! great info there Ataros - I never considered the visibilty/rendering distance calculations - even when optimised, that set of algorithms remains to be performed - I have learn't something already and appreciate the problems regards current performance issues.

[bongodriver]

i.e most people having performance issues are trying to run it on max using totally innadequate hardware.

[Ataros]

I do hope that optimisation is still possible but say when I set land detail on low or even medium landscape already looks very low-res beyond the high detail square surrounding the aircraft.

Bohemia Interactive is an indi studio that made ArmA1/2/3 and VBS. They work for the US government and are 2-4 times bigger than MG (140 people) but they still do not have resources/capabilities to make ArmA2 decently run with 10km visibility radius. This means to me that optimisation has its limits or becomes prohibitively expensive at some point.

For instance I remember the first time I learned about using RAM-drive to ran a game from it. This was a solution to fix stutters in MSFS in 2000 or 2004. The problem was also the visibility distance because other games could run fine on similar hardware. In 2008/2010 the same solution was used by ArmA1/ArmA2 players to fix stutters in ArmA. Now with nextgen videocards it runs faster.

[FS~Phat]

I'd love to see if there is a developer or programmer that can do the maths on this so that it can be put into perspective. I always new people were expecting too much from current gen hardware for this game.

Originally Posted by FS~Phat

I'd love to see if there is a developer or programmer that can do the maths on this so that it can be put into perspective. I always new people were expecting too much from current gen hardware for this game.

In truth though phat, the dev's did tell us that it would run perfectly well on low/medium spec PC's. Luthier always said that all is screen shots/video's were done on a poor quality PC, I even offered to build him a top spec PC so he could show us images with FSAA on because at the time he said his PC wasn't powerful enough to show FSAA, I also said a better spec PC would allow him to show video's with 'true' in game footage. The offer was declined.