Which game video settings strictly use video ram?

B

Bojamijams

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 5, 2008
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178
Hi guys,

I got a new game laptop and (for whatever reason) the 560m card that it uses has 3gb of dedicated video ram. I am able to run the game at HIGH everything (no MLAA, SSAO, no motion blur, HIGH post processing)

I'm wondering which setting I can take up to ULTRA if it only requires video ram.

Is that what Anisotropic filtering uses? What about textures, is that purely just video ram or is it more?

Thanks for any advice you cna give.
 
Textures would be pretty close to the only thing that only requires video ram.

Resolution matters, to an extent (framebuffer), but less than you'd think.

For example, at 1920x1200x32bits-per-pixel = ~9mb per frame. So if you are trying to render something like three frames in advance with 4x multi-sample anti-aliasing, you'd be looking at roughly 12 times that, or about 108mb framebuffer. (Roughly)

So it's pretty minor for most laptop-scale cases. Now, when you start talking about running three 2560x1600 displays on a desktop...well, now you are getting into some serious memory usage for the framebuffer...
 
Texture quality is about as close as you'll get, though I think it relies on memory bandwidth as well. Anything else that's using memory is using it to perform some kind of computation. AF uses practically nothing, FWIW.
 
1 what game are you talking about?

2 are you sure your gpu has 3gb of VRAM? Load up gpuz and see what it says.
 
"There are differences between the 1.5 and 3gb 560m. The 1.5 gb 560m video card that you see is most laptops uses 128 bit memory interface while the 3gb version (Asus g74sx for example) uses a 192 bit interface. Bigger tube better performance."

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=147375

In other words, at the resolutions you are likely to be running the laptop with, the amount of VRAM is not ever going to matter, but the fact that it's a 192bit interface instead of 128bit will matter.
 
Yeah I have the G74SX (great laptop for the money btw), and its 1080p. I'll turn up textures in BF3 to Ultra and see if it hurts it

Silly that laptops have 12gb and 16gb of ram. My home CFX machine only has 8.
 
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