Graphic Card QuestionFollow

Excited for this game to come out! Upgrading my PC components little by little. Last on the list is GPU.


Upgrading from a GTX 550Ti to a 670.

My question, is it worth spending a little more for the 4gb or will the 2gb (gpu ram) suffice?

Basically will I see better performance (benchmark score) with the 4gb as oppose to 2gb

Edited, Mar 29th 2013 10:10pm by WoodGooner

About $60 bucks. Not a huge amount but that's enough for a few months of subscription

Relevent questions:

What is your current OS, 32 bit or 64 bit?

What is your current PC's RAM amount?

32 bit OSes won't recognize more than 4 GB combined system and video RAM.

Windows 7 and Windows 8 64 both are limited to a combined total of 16 GB of RAM, and most folks won't notice a performance difference above 8GB,

More than a combined total of 16 GB system RAM and video RAM can actually cause some issues in a 64 bit OS, as I learned the hard way with my system (which has 16 GB system RAM and another gig on the video card and randomly blue screens about once a week as a result.)

If your system RAM is at 4 GB on a 32 bit OS, don't bother with the extra RAM. If your system RAM is aboave 8 GB on a 64 bit OS, don't bother with the extra RAM. If your system RAM is below 8 GB on a 64 b it OS, you may get a performance boost from the extra RAM - however, you can get 16 GB of DDR3 RAM from NewEgg on a sale for $60, so I'd save the difference and just get yourself a system RAM upgrade.

Dedicated graphics RAM really only gives a boost on mid range systems with middling RAM, where it needs some dedicated solely to the graphics system.

I disagree with a lot of what catwho says. System RAM and video RAM serve two different purposes.

Video RAM is used for 2 things, storing textures and the framebuffer. More video RAM is good for multi-display (larger framebuffer) setups. If you're just using one display then the 2GB version will be fine.

Edited, Mar 30th 2013 2:01am by icebalm

Microsoft imposed a soft limit of 16GB system RAM on their Windows 7 home OSes, because they didn't want them to be used at the enterprise level. (In comparison, Windows Server 2008R2 Enterprise can handle up to 128 GB of RAM total.)

You're right, I wrote that incorrectly two posts up; the VRAM doesn't count toward the total system cap, but the system RAM can always loan some over to the video card setup when it's short (or non existent, as is the case with on board graphics.) VRAM is faster but simpler and can never be used as system RAM. And I definitely did have some memory related blue screens when I first put my shiny new video card in this system But that was Microsoft's or AMD's fault, and the blue screens stopped once they patched whatever memory issue it was having.

Honestly, unless you're using your computer as an SQL server, anything more than 8GB is overkill for the majority of things. The only reason I have 16GB of system memory is because I got a great deal off NewEgg.

Edited, Mar 30th 2013 10:47am by catwho

You won't need more than 2gb of RAM on your video card unless you plan on running 3+ monitors at once, especially eyefinity and the like. I've heard that some new games are experiencing a bit of limitation with 1gb cards, so 2gb seems to be the way to go. I have a Radeon 7870 and it's great for the price.

Sweeeet! Maybe it was 2003 that had the 128 cap. I'm a general sysadmin (and a bunch of other things, including the friggin secretary these days because our normal admin is pregnant and coming in 2 hours late) and we ran into that problem on one of our old 2003 servers. We wanted to stuff as much RAM in it as we could buuuuut since it was 2003 standard we had to upgrade it to 2003 enterprise to finally get anywhere.

This is no where near a necropost

The price you paid for the single GPU is well worth it, but when you consider the marginal performance increase; the answer would be no it's not worth it.

To get the most of SLI you need to tweak the GPUs to get the most from them and you need the program you're running to cooperate. The latter of these two is probably going to be the biggest problem. It remains to be seen how well XIV will perform in SLI after the changes, but I can say confidently that it didn't really perform all that well prior to ARR.

In general, you're not going to double your performance with SLI so from that standpoint, it's not worth the money. There are some comparisons between SLI vs single GPU setups that will make a case for SLI being better price vs performance, but people often look at the wrong indicators when comparing benchmark scores. Your lowest FPS value should always be the deciding factor as it indicates performance when there is the most stress on the GPU. Consider that if you value benchmarks or using them for comparisons.

Another question: I'm thinking about upgrading to a new computer (current machine gets 4300 on benchmark medium settings, but it's three years old and getting slow). The new machine I'm looking at comes with NVIDIA Geforce GT (Not GTX) 620. How does the GT 620 compare to the GTX 5xx Square recommends?

Thanks for the quick reply. Wow, yeah that's crappy. Guess I'll just have to settle for the medium settings on existing machine for now...

The new Nvidia 650 Ti BOOST cards are quite nice (I got two of them for SLI) but the single card scores over 5000 on the maxed out settings for the bench. I got the EVGA Superclocked 2gb model:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130910

As you can see they're quite affordable.



Edit to add: my CPU is a stock clocked 2600k i7, 8gb of Ripjaw RAM, and an EVGA P67 FTW motherboard. SSD naturally

Edited, Apr 9th 2013 12:47pm by Wint

Edited, Apr 9th 2013 12:48pm by Wint

I hate you for that news. T.T