Gadgetory

regardless of which side of the fence you're on red or green most of us can agree that in video was a bit misleading when it came to their advertised four gigabytes of vram on their GTX 970 s for those of you who aren't familiar with this issue an NVIDIA standard for via Ram supplies been about three gigabytes up until the GTX 780 but with the release of the 970 and the 980 an extra V Ram chip has been added to the PCB to communicate with a new maximum architecture GPU to add an extra gigabyte of VRAM so now we have four gigs instead of three gigs and it's advertised as such on both the GTX 970 and the GTX 980 but while the GTX 980 can access its full 4 gigabytes of vram and it's full bus frequency the GTX 970 has a bit of a problem past 3.5 gigabytes up to 3.5 gigabytes the GTX 970 behaves identically to the GTX 980 but it's that final point 5 gigabytes of vram that is the GTX 970 s Achilles heel but why it's because that final half a gig of VRAM is actually severely under clocked in terms of how fast it communicates with the GPU this can pose a problem for gamers who I don't like to throw a bunch of dense texture packs into their games or turn up distance scaling to the max setting possible these kinds of additional veeram requirements can pose mighty big problems for the GTX 970 so what I've got in this rig behind me is a gigabyte windforce a GTX 970 g1 gaming Edition graphics card we're going to throw a few games at it but I expect in particular GTA 5 to reveal some pretty obvious results so we're going to be able to see whether or not passing 3.5 gigabytes of memory allocation poses a problem for the GTX 970 and for you who are utilizing the GTX 970 currently so let's go ahead and investigate let's see what we end up with I wanted to try a few games other than GTA 5 first I honestly didn't think cities skylines order trolley would even utilize more than about three gigabytes of vram and I was right with every single setting in both games completely maxed out we didn't even pass 3.2 gigabytes of memory usage we also never dipped it below 30 yet PS an either game which was quite nice so on to GTA 5 then my first step was to turn settings up just enough to rub against the 3.5 cake boundary this test would be our control I draw a few blocks through the city and then made my way into the mountains where I expected the grass being on ultra to drop our framerate by a significant amount I was averaging about 40 FPS in the city and about 25 FPS in the grass which seemed about right next I pushed the memory usage just above 3.5 gigabytes and ran through the same course but I didn't notice any framerate dips apart from journeying through the grass once again now on my third run next I maxed out every possible setting again no noticeable frame drops or stuttering at 1080p the next trial consisted of lowering a few advanced graphics settings and pushing the frame scale up to 5/4 essentially increasing our in-game resolution by 25% this pushed us a solid 200 megabytes above the 3.5 gig threshold but no still nothing our overall frame rate had definitely been sliced but nothing out of the ordinary ended up slashing our FPS until rain that's right it began raining in the game and then suddenly stuttering here stuttering there it was fairly consistent throughout and could definitely become a nuisance of its presence what's prolonged what's likely going on here is that the rain is requiring the graphics card to completely remap texture units since the transition is nowhere near as slow as the fade from day to night the memory bus is consistently being squeezed for every ounce of data only the final half gig of memory is taking much longer to send data to the GPU now because it's only 5% of the total memory bandwidth being restrained the stuttering isn't prolonged but when it strikes it strikes it with a vengeance a solid couple seconds of gameplay is completely lost in the process which could be disastrous especially in first-person shooters or RPGs so I guess we should summarize it like this if you plan on playing in 1080p only with your GTX 970 to the point where you can max out pretty much any setting that you wish you're gonna be just fine in almost any circumstance 1440p is a slightly different story only slightly and here's why while yes you will be using more memory in 1440p because you're going to be meeting too store larger chunks of data because you're gonna be pushing more pixels to a screen you will have to cut back on some things such as anti-aliasing ambient occlusion maybe some of the things you ought to scale back in order to keep those appropriate frame rates around 30 to 60 fps and most triple-a titles so in a sense you'll be adding some memory requirements but you'll be subtracting some as well by cutting back on those additional settings 2160p totally different beast but I don't recommend purchasing at GTX 970 for the purpose of playing triple-a titles in 4k and I don't have a 4k monitor so we're not going to be able to test that truly anyway but think about it you're gonna be increasing your pixel density right playing at 4k but you're going to have to cut back on things like texture packs and rendering distances and anti-aliasing all of that you'll be able to notice much more when playing in 4k so it kind of counteracts itself it's kind of oxymoronic actually so I wouldn't purchase this for 4k gaming you might be okay with it but I'm not and that's why I'm not going to test them in this video test that resolution but in 1080p and 1440p this card handles quite a bit of memory usage very well even when it passes 3.5 gigabytes the card is fairly smart it knows what memory data needs to be sent to the GPU right away and what can wait and the stuff that can wait is typically allocated and thats lower half a gig portion of memory and that's that that's why the GTX 970 doesn't suffer as much as it appears to suffer and all of these tech vlogs and websites that say that this is such a big issue so with that you all know the routine let me know what you think about the GTX 970 and whether or not you should consider it over the r9 390 which is generally a better performer in most games and does come with twice as much veer and that's right a gigabytes of vram versus four or three and a half and 0.5 with slow vram depending on how you look at it if you own a GTX 970 let me know in the comments below and tell me what you personally think about your car and very interested to hear what you have to say be sure to give the video a thumbs up if you thought the video was great and give it a thumbs down if you think that we need to improve somewhere apart from that be sure to subscribe if you haven't already we'll be posting some pretty cool benchmarks and regards to our pentium g 4400 if gtx970 pairing how well with a pretty cheap cpu do with a very powerful GPU find out in our next video this is science studio thanks for learning with us