Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor on box today we're digging into the fun topic of VRAM capacity that's it this video isn't going to be an in-depth look at a wide range of graphics cards with varying vram capacities instead for this one we're going to be looking at the two gigabyte and four gigabyte versions of the geforce gtx 680 so why am i doing a VRAM capacity comparison with a six year old graphics card because I can recently I got my hands on the 4 gigabyte GTX 680 I've had the 2 gigabyte model since it was released and while I was able to borrow a full gigabyte model for testing 6 years ago back then I didn't really learn much other than the fact that at the time it was just a huge waste of money because games didn't require that much of a ram even at 1600 P today though games can often and do consume more than 2 gigabytes of vram at 1080p and we looked at this last year an hour how much RAM do gamers need video the question is though how much if any impact does this have on frame rate performance and other any other drawbacks to having 2 gigabytes of vram opposed to 4 gigabytes or more in our recent gtx 680 revisit using the more common 2 gigabyte version i was often told the results were misleading and if i had used a 4 gigabyte version of the gtx 680 it would have been much faster in today's games then shortly after that video i revisited the r9 280x and i included just the 4 gigabyte version of the gtx 680 to see if anyone noticed as it turns out it seems only the AMD fans noticed and they screamed biased as i was misrepresenting the gtx 680 by using the 4 gigabyte version which is naturally much faster this isn't new either the hottest talking point of my 2016 video can the gtx 1050 to outperform 2012 $500 flagship gtx 680 wasn't the fact that the gtx 680 was handicapped by the 2 gigabyte memory buffer and in a win for sure if it had 4 gigabytes like the gtx 1050 TI anyway let's not worry about that and move on to the results I have some graphs for you guys followed by some side-by-side gameplay footage which reveals something very interesting but we'll get that in a moment for now let's check out the graphs first up we have the dawn of war three results and as you can see the four gigabyte model is no faster than the two gigabyte version delivering the exact same result I should note I did attempt to clock both models at the same frequency but the two gigabyte model would often clock itself about two percent higher so keep that in mind as we continue to go over their results the dirt fall performance was also much the same though the two gigabyte model did come out slightly ahead but with less than a two percent difference that's certainly within our margin of error especially given the possible clock speed difference Ghost Recon wildlands still exceeds the two gigabyte usage even with these low quality settings but despite that the four gigabyte model appeared no faster then we have Mass Effect Andromeda and here we see performance again is much the same with either model battlefield one is one of the few games i've tested maxed out and even here the four gigabyte model is only slightly faster the average can certainly be chalked up to the margin of error and that 5% increase for the one percent low is probably genuine though the difference really could be as small as two percent the two gigabyte version was consistently faster and prey and two FPS might not be that much here but there is a little more to this story and I will look at that in a moment finally rounding out the graphs is Resident Evil 7 and again there's just nothing to see here folks formats wise there's no difference between the two you buy and four gigabyte versions of the gtx 680 even in modern titles ok so now it's time to check out some side-by-side gameplay footage and we'll start with battlefield one here you can see despite using the ultra quality settings we're only just exceeding two gigabytes of vram and therefore the two gigabyte gtx 680 is able to hang in there rendering the textures without an issue although the minimum frame rate did drop down more for the two gigabyte model in this pass keep in mind this is just a single run and over an average of three runs they were much more similar moving on we have Star Wars Battlefront - oddly here the full gigabyte model actually consumed more system memory than the two gigabyte version so that was a little unexpected that said we have seen examples in the past we're giving more memory just makes things a little more memory hungry the game was tested at 1080p using the higher quality settings and as you can see the game does allocate more than erm performance though was basically identical using either two gigabyte or full gigabyte version of the GTX 680 next up we have project cars - and this toilet was tested using the ultra quality settings and this meant the game allocated up to 2.7 gigabytes of vram and this time we do see the 2 gigabyte model consuming roughly 1 gigabyte more of system memory still in our test system performance was much the same using either model now we have some rise of the Tomb Raider action and for this one we were forced down to the medium quality settings for playable performance however I have jacked the textures up to the higher quality setting to increase the VRAM usage under these conditions up to 2.9 gigabytes of vram was allocated for the 4 gigabyte model and this meant VRAM usage was considerably higher with the 2 gigabyte model that said overall performance was much the same with just 2 frames in it and that's nowhere near enough to be noticeable Assassin's Creed origins was also tested using the medium quality preset with the textures manually set to high this saw verum usage peak 2.5 gigabytes though like star wars battlefront 2 we find that RAM usage was actually lower with the 2 gigabyte card so again a very curious result last up we have prey and this is the most interesting title this game was tested using the higher quality preset and VRAM usage did peak at 3.1 gigabytes but if you recall the 2 gigabyte model was faster in our previous prey benchmark if you haven't already noticed the reason for this seems to be the fact that the 2 gigabyte model simply isn't even attempting to render most of the textures is it better look at the issue I noted this was happening in our GTX 680 revisit a few weeks ago I said the game was very playable and quite smooth in fact but it just looks horrible with most of the textures missing and now you can see what I mean so when it comes to benchmark numbers for the most part the vram capacity has little impact on performance and this is also true not just for benchmarks but for when playing for hours upon hours unless you have a very limited amount of system memory or the memory using is very slow then chances are spotting the difference is going to be very unlikely now as you've just seen visual quality can be significantly impacted depending on the game praise the only title I came across where the 2 gigabyte GTX 680 wasn't noticeably worse but they'll no doubt be other titles as well of course it was still playable it just looked pretty ordinary tweaking the quality settings to better balance the load might help but really you will be more limited with what you can do with the 2 gigabyte model basically what all this means is if you can get your hands on a 4 gigabyte version of the GTX 680 or any other graphics card for that matter then it's worth doing if you're not paying an exuberant price premium over the 2 gigabyte model looking at budget graphics cards like the rx 550 you can at times get the 4 gigabyte version for just $10 more and I would suggest you do so sometimes though you will be faced with a $4 premium and that's where things get a bit iffy in my opinion for the most part you won't see a 40% return on investment especially if you're playing less demanding titles such as overwatch and fortnight for example so keep that in mind anyway I hope this video helps clear up some misconceptions about vram capacity more is certainly desirable but it doesn't always mean better performance so be careful how much you spend to nab that extra GDR memory if you did enjoy this video be sure to the like button subscribe for more content and if you appreciate the testing we do here at our run box then consider supporting us on patreon I'm your host Dave see you again next time