With all the talk of OOM's and video ram and etc being discussed, at the same time as many (including me) are thinking of purchasing new graphics cards, I got curious as to just what difference I would see when choosing between a 4 gigabyte card and a 2 Gigabyte card. Instinct says bigger is better, but is it? I found an article that takes a look:

Any comments? For me, Since I have no intention of running multi-screen, it seems like a faster 2gb card might be better for my budget and overall, than a slightly slower 4gb card. (My choice right now is between a 4gb Nvidia 760 or a 2gb Nvidia 770)

 

http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Video-Card-Performance-2GB-vs-4GB-Memory-154/

 

//Mod edit--posting a link is OK, however posting the entire article is a copyright violation//

Not the size question, again?? It's not just the size, it's what you do with it! And yes, I'm talking about video cards...

 

Six months ago I bought a 770/2gb. With my adoption of a copy of P3Dv2, if I was buying today the card would have 4gb of vram, even if it was a little slower than a card with 2gb of vram. My unscientific thinking being if I fill the 2gb card's memory, it now needs to swap back through the PCI-e bus over to the SATA circuits to throw some memory onto the swap file. Then it will read from the swap file, send through the SATA circuits, over to the PCI-e bus back into the VC's vram to display on screen. Over and over and over again.

 

Now if you use XPX or P3D2 and can control your urge to move those sliders up just a little more..., then the faster card with the smaller sized vram would be a better choice. And we all know how restrained FS'ers are when it comes to keeping sliders in the middle, right????

Well... as far as P3Dv2 I cant really see whats taking up all the supposed ram. Wouldn't be surprised if the weird thing about frames being fine then dropping (and the Oom's) turned out to be a nasty memory leak, or something with the video drivers.

 

I voted for faster card, smaller memory and some self-restraint.

 

Looking through the threads, I saw a few people with old 1gb video cards that were getting steady 25fps, and others with beast cards that were getting Oom's. I suspect something else is going on.

 

Honestly, I cant imagine how the relatively paltry graphics of P3D are going to legitimately strain a Card that can run BF4 at ultra settings.

 

 

Looking through the threads, I saw a few people with old 1gb video cards that were getting steady 25fps, and others with beast cards that were getting Oom's. I suspect something else is going on.

I have noticed that as well, plus from what I have gathered from an anecdotal perspective is ATI cards seem to run quite nicely.  I sure wish more information were available.  I am in the middle of a system build and need to make a decision on a video card.