VRAM on GPUs

D

D1craig

Enthusiast
so been reading the forums and some have said they have seen their GPUs being pushed by some games. they have said "it wants more than the 2GB ram it has".

so i was thinking with the rise of 4K wouldnt we need 4x the VRAM not 2x? 4K is 4 fullHD monitors in one after all. or are the GPUs around atm pushing 3/4/6GB VRAM going to be sufficient? i dont see how they could be good enough if the 2GB cards are what we use for 1 fullHD monitor.
 
Last edited:
mantadog

mantadog

Superhero Level Poster
1GB used to be fine for 1080p then it became 2GB as games makers took advantage of more people having cards with more VRAM.

In terms of how much 4k will eventually need, it will eventually need more than 8GB I'm fairly sure of that. However it will be a few generations away before cards can really drive monitors that resolution comfortably anyway, presumably by which time they will be equipped with 6-8GB RAM as standard.
 
G

grimsbymatt

Enthusiast
4K (well, what is commonly called 4K, i.e. 3840 x 2160) is four times the pixels, so I assume you'd need four times the VRAM for textures.
 
D

D1craig

Enthusiast
We could just refer to it as 4HD. So many people have problems with 4K lol. And tbh it is 4K. Why do we use the second lot if numbers to describe HD, 1080 instead of 1920?

That's what I'm saying though. If we are using almost 2GB for HD them it would require 8GB for 4HD.

But after reading about this for a few days I find a lot of interesting stuff. The VRAM doesn't really matter. It's not like your gpu turns off if it tries to use more than you have.
 
G

grimsbymatt

Enthusiast
D1craig said:
And tbh it is 4K. Why do we use the second lot if numbers to describe HD, 1080 instead of 1920?
Click to expand...

It's not really 4K, though. Industry standard 4K is 4,096 pixels wide. UHD TVs (and therefore presumably PC monitors & laptops) is 3,840 - double the width of HD.

It is odd that they've swapped which dimension they use to describe it.
 
mantadog

mantadog

Superhero Level Poster
They switched from vertical to horizontal resolution for marketing reasons. So people who don't know much about tech will go, wow I only had a 1080p TV now I can get one almost 4 times betterererer!

Assuming you need 4 x the VRAM to load the textures is dangerous. As I said in my first post 1GB was 'plenty' for 1080p not so long ago.

Games makers only ramp up the specs when enough consumers have the tech required to run it reasonably. They will make do with 4-6-or 8GB VRAM if they have to until people have the hardware for it. Like you said, your GPU doesn't stop working if you try to play at too high a resolution, it just sucks at it.
 
mantadog

mantadog

Superhero Level Poster
grimsbymatt said:
It's not really 4K, though. Industry standard 4K is 4,096 pixels wide. UHD TVs (and therefore presumably PC monitors & laptops) is 3,840 - double the width of HD.

It is odd that they've swapped which dimension they use to describe it.
Click to expand...

They use 3840 × 2160 because it 16:9 ratio. the 'full' resolution of 4096 × 2160 is 19:10. scaling the display would cause problems if they didn't just go for a 16:9 display.
 
D

D1craig

Enthusiast
Same with most thing PC. ram isn't really 8GB.

Broadband is from the bit not the byte.

It's all about confusing the newbies. And every now and then it gets some not so newbies.
 
M

mdwh

Enthusiast
mantadog said:
They switched from vertical to horizontal resolution for marketing reasons. So people who don't know much about tech will go, wow I only had a 1080p TV now I can get one almost 4 times betterererer!
Click to expand...
Though to be fair, it is four times better :) (Four times as many pixels.)

One of the shams though has been that "HD" refers to both 1280x720 and 1920x1080, since people are less likely to notice it not being referred to as "Full HD", or things are often referred to as HD rather than 720p or 1080p. So in some ways, switching to a system that explicitly refers to a number rather than just "HD" will be clearer.
 
mantadog

mantadog

Superhero Level Poster
Yes I understand it is 4 x better, all i'm saying is its a market ploy. perhaps to avoid the confusion I should have put it this way. If they referred to it as 2k, people would think "geez, im not updating for just double the pixels"

But yes actually referring to the resolution is miles better than shadily saying "oh yeah its HD ready" rather than 'Full' HD
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top