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What happens when you're out of VRAM?

post #1 of 81
7/2/12 at 3:26am
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First of all,this is NOT an issue thread,I have no VRAM related problems,I just want to know more about this...

I do know that programs who show VRAM usage only show how much of it is reserved by the running application,and that the real VRAM usage is dynamic,since not every game scene requires the same ammount (looking at a wall is obviously less intensive than looking at a battle)...

But,I want to know,what happens when you run out of VRAM,when you find an in-game scene that needs more VRAM than your card can provide?
Are there FPS drops,and how bad are they?
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post #2 of 81
7/2/12 at 3:32am
Currently I have a gtx 460 768mb, when this card runs out of Vram my FPS usually dips down to around 15/20FPS
So usually when you max it you have a massive FPS drop, however I have seen some cases where games actually crash when that happens, however it has never happened to me.
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post #3 of 81
7/2/12 at 3:35am
Quote:
when this card runs out of Vram my FPS usually dips down to around 15/20FPS

^this, my brother drops to around 10fps from 50fps when his 560ti 1gb card runs out. Generally you would have to turn settings down to avoid this problem if you were having it.
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post #4 of 81
7/2/12 at 3:36am
^
Exactly that.
Fps drop is probably caused because your system is looking for space to store data that should go in the vram.

Sent from my R800i using Tapatalk 2
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post #5 of 81
7/2/12 at 3:41am
What happens when you run out of Vram is that the card will attempt to borrow main memory for extra space. This is significantly slower than vram, plus has to take up even more PCI-E bandwidth. Your FPS will plummet, even more if you're tight on main memory and the machine has to start paging to a hard-disk, that will turn your game into a powerpoint presentation.
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post #6 of 81
7/2/12 at 3:41am
Quote:
Originally Posted by amputate View Post

^
Exactly that.
Fps drop is probably caused because your system is looking for space to store data that should go in the vram.
Sent from my R800i using Tapatalk 2

This,

I've never seen a game crash or heard of it.. Overheating/unstable overclocks however.. rolleyes.gif

Usually it just lags lots, which indicates one of two things..

Out of vRam, or out of RAM. Usually vRam if you have a bit of ram (8GB or more). smile.gif
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post #7 of 81
7/2/12 at 3:44am
Quote:
Originally Posted by amputate View Post

^
Exactly that.
Fps drop is probably caused because your system is looking for space to store data that should go in the vram.
Sent from my R800i using Tapatalk 2

The FPS dips because the stuff that does not fit on to the vram will be sent to the system RAM which is obviously much slower the the GDDR memory found on graphics cards and thus causes a bottleneck. Depending on the game engine there might happen what is called shuffling where the more critical stuff it rearranged to be on the vram and the less critical stuff is sent to the system ram in an attempt to keep the FPS up.
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post #8 of 81
7/2/12 at 11:07am
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Thanks for the answers,all of you...
Time to give out some rep+ smile.gif
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post #9 of 81
7/2/12 at 11:11am
when i ran out of vram(8 mb of vram)everything would stutter ,then slow very slow,to one fps to actually completly freeze!i would wait a while sometime it did restart and game became a bit more fluid,(very low fps like 3 or 4 fps)most of the time tho it would just stay with a stand still image.so you had to remove the battery in the laptop ,unplug it and then replug and reput the battery!today dev cheat a lot so i doubt this would happen !you would probably see something else drop first like quality,other program being shut down by gpu or os etc!

as for the speed dip of the ram vs the vram ,its because the distance is a lot further ,not because of the speed of the ram,most ram are faster then vram but they are on the mobo and have to probably pass by the cpu first!ansd like some said pcie play a major role here!imagine you would need to receive data going to the gpu and send data going to ram etc!so that pcie2 just became a pcie1 as far as gpu is concerned!this is why you are better off having 4 gb gpu same as window file size this way no problem !everything fit everywhere.me i tend to favor 8 gb of ram for one reason,ramdisk!if you dont ever ramdisk?then 4gb of ram and 4gb vram gpu is perfect!
Edited by drbaltazar - 7/2/12 at 11:19am
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post #10 of 81
7/2/12 at 11:16am
Should start seing a signficant decrease in FPS. Time to start turning down AA/AF & Texture quality thumb.gif
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