New Patch Micro Pauses

[TonyD]

Originally Posted by Bikerjack

Tony,

Something I don't understand is that, if the 2Gb VRAM on one card is maxed out, why do I have the same issues with stutters/temporary screen freezes as mentioned here with two cards linked by Crossfire? Effectively 4Gb?

Also, why do we need 16Gb of DDR RAM when only 15% (on average) seems to be used when running the game?

Regards

Hi BJ (sounds vaguely rude )

When running X-Fire you still only have the VRAM available on one card – each frame rendered has to fit into the available VRAM on each card, it isn’t shared. For ‘alternate frame’ rendering, the cards take turns in rendering successive frames, so whatever detail is being rendered is done by one card at a time, taking turns.

And you don’t need 16GB of RAM for any game – most are 32-bit and therefore couldn’t use more than ~3GB, although I have never seen CloD use more than ~1.30GB (even when VRAM usage reaches nearly 2GB). Having more RAM than you need won’t improve performance; it will make your machine a little slower since all the memory will still need to be mapped by the system, even if it is not in use. The actual difference is negligible, though.