6990 vram

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ranxzy

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Hi everybody new to the forums. I just wanted to ask about the AMD 6990s memory. I understand that in regular xfire like with two 6970s or 580s in SLI the memory does not multiply so only 2GB or 1.5GB for the 580s would be usable in these cases. The thing is that I'm sure that I read somewhere that the 6990 is actually able to effectively use it's 4GB of memory unlike a 590 where only 1.5GB is usable. Is this the case?

I've discussed this in another forum and the person is adamant the 6990 can use 2GB effectively max like a 6970 CF.
 
It is still the same as two 6970s - the memory is duplicated, so you have 2GB effective even though there is 4GB on the card. It's just CrossFire on a single card.
 
It is probably worth nothing that when you are displaying your VRAM usage in afterburner it will appear as double what your actual usage is (assuming two GPUs).
 
So if afterburner is displaying 2.5GB vram usage in BF3 I'm only really using 1.25GB?
 
ranxzy said:
So if afterburner is displaying 2.5GB vram usage in BF3 I'm only really using 1.25GB?
Click to expand...

Yep. Whatever Afterburner is displaying for your vram usage divide it by the number of GPUs you have. so if 2.5gb usage is shown and you have 2 gpus then 1.25. If you have 4 GPUs and it's showing 5gb then again its 1.25g per gpu
 
ranxzy said:
Hi everybody new to the forums. I just wanted to ask about the AMD 6990s memory. I understand that in regular xfire like with two 6970s or 580s in SLI the memory does not multiply so only 2GB or 1.5GB for the 580s would be usable in these cases. The thing is that I'm sure that I read somewhere that the 6990 is actually able to effectively use it's 4GB of memory unlike a 590 where only 1.5GB is usable. Is this the case?

I've discussed this in another forum and the person is adamant the 6990 can use 2GB effectively max like a 6970 CF.
Click to expand...

its 2gb effective for the 6990 and its 1.5gb effective with the gtx 590 and asus mars 2

its kinda weird at first...but if you think about it, graphics card companies can't advertise their product as only 2gb or whatever....because technically their are 2 GPUs involved...so they advertise it as 4gb...but yeah, its only 2gb effective because its cross fired already
 
Thats the vram. What about the other ram like the L2 and such the cards has?
 
Spooony said:
Thats the vram. What about the other ram like the L2 and such the cards has?
Click to expand...

That is more internal architecture depedant, and so isn't really comparable between different manufacturers/generations - but all the GTX 580s have the same L2, no matter who makes the card, and same with the AMD ones, since the L2 is on-die.
 
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