VRAM vs Performance Test.

[Ericmopar]

I decided to post this since a lot of people seem to be in the market for new GPUs lately.
The gist of this is, huge amounts of VRAM only help when the monitor resolution goes over 5k.
That my friends is a very expensive monitor or TV that most of us will never buy.
Even then the difference is only a 5FPS advantage at very low unusable frame rates.
Below 5k screen resolution, the speed of the GPU is far more important than the amount of VRAM on the GPU.

http://techreport.com/blog/28800/how-mu ... -is-enough

[peterhayes]

Eric
I see the VRAM issue different to this report and your interpretation of it.
This report tested just a single game but I don't think that you can extrapolate, the findings to what happens in TS2016.
To me this conclusion is quite telling:

"cards with 4GB of video memory can generally get by just fine, even with relatively high image quality settings. Similarly, the GeForce GTX 970 seems to handle 4K gaming quite well in spite of its funky partitioned memory. Meanwhile, at higher resolutions, no current single-GPU graphics card is fast enough for fluid gaming, no matter how much memory it might have."

and

"The biggest concern, though, is future games that simply require more memory due to the use of higher-quality textures and other assets.

To me, that echoes my point, which has always been that VRAM is important if you do not want to bottleneck/throttle a sim like TS2016, and you want to use high image quality settings.
If you do NOT have enough VRAM for your monitor resolution then performance will suffer.
TS 2016 does use in excess of 2GB VRAM on my ASUS 27" 2560 x 1440P monitor, and I accept that I am measuring that at the OS level. does that 4GB VRAM on the card benefit my experience with TS2016? Honestly I don't know, but I get smooth video with very very few stutters and no video realted issues.
I agree that bandwidth is very important (more so possibly than VRAM) - but IMO you have to balance both (together with mobo, monitor, cpu, RAM, cooling, Monitor, psu) to get best results in TS 2016.

Regards
pH

[PapaXpress]

Not to go too far off topic, but what do you think of gsync? Is it hype? Will it help Railworks?

[Ericmopar]

Not to go too far off topic, but what do you think of gsync? Is it hype? Will it help Railworks?

It will absolutely help our sim. The problem is that the prices are way high for a lot of us.
It will allow lower frame rates without the low FPS screen tearing that happens to us. That BTW is what a lot of people have been calling "micro stutter".
If I can get my hands on a G-Sync monitor, I'm going to lock my frames down to 30 or 40. That will help save the GPU as well as smooth things out.

If anyone reads this that owns a AMD GPU, remember you would need a Free Sync monitor, not G-Sync.

As for what you said Peter, you are missing the whole point of the article.
If you have something approximating a normal screen resolution like 1920 by 1080 the large memory is non relevant.
The large amounts of VRAM don't matter until you are using really high settings and have huge 4k and up screen resolutions. Look at the charts in article.
Even then the difference is really small, something like a 5fps difference at super low unusable frame rates.

[buzz456]

Oh oh, Geek fight.

[peterhayes]

Eric
Sorry we have to agree to disagree!!
I don't think that I missed any point at all. Is TS2016 VRAM-hungry - even using DSR?
Where were the comparisons with 1GB, 2GB VRAM cards which today are used by the majority of simmers using TS2016?
Its also a comparison as to why NVidia cards are better in some situations than their AMD counterparts, especially when the r9 Fury X has a memory bandwidth of 512Gb/sec which is significantly higher when compared to the GTX 980TI MB with a mere MB of 336GB/sec, plus the Fury has a memory clock of 8000 higher than the GTX980TI's of 7000. In many tests like this you can't take anything for granted.
I still maintain that a balanced system is needed to run TS2016 optimally.
Its a single report using high end video cards, and quite artificial measures of modern game performance.


Papa express
I run 2 GSYNC monitors and they really are good for TS2016 - IMO a major advance.
Even at low frame rates there is no stuttering and the video is smooth and clear.

Buzz
For you, The Big Pock Candy Mountain says it all!!

Regards
PeterH