Does anyone actually use more than 4gb of video memory in game?

[khumak]

I'm curious how many people actually exceed 4GB of video memory utilization in game with either TTW or Skyrim (original, not SE).  I plan on upgrading my video card soon and was considering a GTX 1060 or 1070, but after reading a bunch of reviews there's a lot of people who mention that the fan and/or coil noise is pretty noticeable on the 1060 and 1070 while the 1050Ti seems to be a lot quieter.  Noise is a deal breaker for me, my system is completely silent and I want it to stay that way.

Anyway I currently use a GTX 760 and am able to use most but not all of the visual enhancements that I'd like to add to my lineup in Skyrim.  I suspect that doubling my video memory from 2 to 4 GB would probably allow me to use pretty much everything.  TTW is the other game that I'll probaby spend most of my gaming time with for the foreseeable future.  I run at 1920x1080 resolution and have no plans to go any bigger than that.  I haven't reinstalled TTW since redoing my Steam install but I will probably get back into that soon.

[khumak]

Yeah I use Windows 10 so I'm stuck with a 4GB max for Skyrim and TTW.  I'm not going back to Windows 7 just for that.  My current Skyrim setup uses about 1.8GB of video memory.  I didn't have anything that gave me memory utilization readings installed when I last had TTW running but I'm pretty sure I did run into some cases where I was exceeding the 2GB my current card has.

I could get a bigger card for when I move to Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE but fan noise really annoys me so I think I'll have to wait for the next generation of cards to get something with more memory that is still silent.

[FiftyTifty]

That's...Really not the case. Direct3D 9 can only use a maximum of 4GB of VRAM in Windows 10. Outside of Windows 10, programs can use more if they're compiled for 64bit. If they're 32bit, there's a hard cap of 3.1GB or so with the LAA flag enabled, and the mirrored VRAM from Direct3D contributes.

 

A work around to this, is to spawn secondary processes used solely for mirroring the VRAM. This is what ENB Series' ENBHost.exe process is for.

[khumak]

[quote=MajinCry]

 

That's...Really not the case. Direct3D 9 can only use a maximum of 4GB of VRAM in Windows 10. Outside of Windows 10, programs can use more if they're compiled for 64bit. If they're 32bit, there's a hard cap of 3.1GB or so with the LAA flag enabled, and the mirrored VRAM from Direct3D contributes.

 

A work around to this, is to spawn secondary processes used solely for mirroring the VRAM. This is what ENB Series' ENBHost.exe process is for.

[/quote]

I do use an ENB but from what Boris (the creator of ENBseries) said, it sounds like that doesn't work for DX9, people are stuck with 4GB on DX9 + Windows 10 even with ENB.  I have no way to test it myself since my current card is 2GB and the one I ordered yesterday is only 4GB.  I was originally planning to get a bigger card but I went with the GTX 1050Ti due to noise levels for the other ones.  So once I decided on that it's a nonissue for me.

[FiftyTifty]

On Windows 10, yes, as Microsoft decided to gimp it for some dumb reason. Wouldn't be the first time they've bastardized their OS; Windows Vista and Windows 7 don't support HW accelerated sound processing.

[khumak]

[quote=MajinCry]

 

On Windows 10, yes, as Microsoft decided to gimp it for some dumb reason. Wouldn't be the first time they've bastardized their OS; Windows Vista and Windows 7 don't support HW accelerated sound processing.

[/quote]

Yeah from some of the other comments on the subject it sounds like the reason DX9 is gimped in Windows 10 is that it's not allowed to run as a native app, it has to run in compatibility mode.

I did get my new card today and noticed something else I thought was a little odd.  Initially I decided to just slap the new card in and see what the performance difference was with no change in my mods.  My frame rate went up a little but not much, old card was about 35-50 FPS outside, new card is more like 45-50 FPS outside.  So I installed 2-4k textures for everything and loaded it up again, no change in frame rate.  Still 45-50 FPS.  So I'm guessing for Skyrim maybe I'm CPU bound or something once I get up around 50 FPS outside.  Using all of those texture packs with my old card either gave me an immediate CTD or frame rate in the 0-10 range.

Inside I get a constant 60 with both cards.  Will have to reinstall TTW soon and see what the difference is for Fallout.  My old card had major problems anywhere near Arefu unless I completely disabled all grass, trees, and shadows.

[khumak]

Seems the meminfo tool I was using doesn't really give any info about graphics performance, just system memory.  That's probably why I was having issues trying to gauge how well my graphics card was performing.  It didn't show any increase in memory when I loaded up all the big texture mods.

I installed Nvidia Inspector and now I can see realtime graphs of my video memory and GPU utilization and my newly added mods get me right up near the limit on my new card.  3.8 GB video memory utilization and GPU utilization up to 99% depending on where I am.  Should make for a more useful tool to tweak my visuals to just below what my card can handle.

After running around some more my GPU is usually pegged at 90-100% outside but rarely above 80% inside so that probably explains the frame rate difference.  Video Memory utilization is also consistently lower inside than outside.

[FiftyTifty]

There are two main factors affecting draw call performance:

1. CPU brand - AMD CPUs are >3.5x worse than their intel performance equivalents. Core 2 made a huge jump in draw call perf, with each subsequent architecture further improving on that. You won't ever be getting a consistent 60fps on any of Bethesda's open world games, if you're not running a modern intel CPU (Nehalem and newer).

2. GPU brand - AMD GPUs have a hardware scheduler. This means that they have better draw call performance due to reduced driver overhead. NVidia's GPUs since the 200 series have a software scheduler, which means draw calls take up quite a bit more processing. The flipside, is that lacking a HW scheduler allows the GPU manufacture to support D3D 11's Driver Command Lists, which is an extremely inefficient way of balancing draw calls across cores.

The ideal for Direct3D 9 games, is to buy an overclockable i5, and an AMD GPU.

 

If you want to see if you're GPU limited, set all the resolution (screen, shadow, texture) settings to as low as poss, but keep object and shadow distances maxed. Compare the fps to your previous framerate in the same scene.