List of known/suspected games to eat more than 1GB video memory at 1920x1200

[sniper_sung]

Just because a game uses more than 1 Gb of Vram doesnt mean that it is going to run at over 30 min FPS on a 2 Gb card with the same GPU, or see any improvement to performance even in games that use up more than 1 Gb Vram.

Every review on the 1 Gb 6950 shows it performing just as badly at minimum FPS scores as the 2 Gb card in any example where you would expect Vram usage to exceed 1 Gb.

At the most in any such case, the improvement to minimum FPS was bought up from something like 18 FPS on a 1 Gb card, to 22 FPS on a 2 Gb card.

Even with the extra 1 Gb Vram, the 2 Gb 6950 would still not maintain a minimum FPS of higher than 30, indicating that the lack of Vram on the 1 Gb cards is not the factor that is limiting performance, the factor is that the GPU itself is too slow.

I've seen plenty of users running triple monitor eyefinity rigs on crossfire 1 Gb 5870s, and never complaining about low FPS problems.

In the case of the OP's examples, improvements were not seen because the graphics cards were upgraded from 1 Gb to 2 Gb cards, improvements were seen because the GPUs were upgraded from 5870s to 6950s.

Try again with a fairer comparison of a 1 Gb 6950 vs a 2 Gb 6950, and conclude that the 2 Gb card manages to maintain a 30 FPS minimum in games where the 1 Gb is falling below 25 to fairly conclude that 2 Gb of Vram evidently brings minimum frame rates in such games up to a 30 minimum over a 1 Gb card.

Note in this chart, the minimum FPS of both the 1 Gb and 2 Gb 6950s in Crysis Warhead for the second result:

Having said that, yes I would still have bought 2 Gb versions of my cards if they had been available for the simple reason that like a lot of enthusiasts, I am simply convinced without requiring any logical reasons that more Vram = better, even though there is not any evidence proving that this is actually true. However, I do not believe that having 2 Gb Vram would provide any noticable improvement to any game, even if if using up over 1 Gb Vram and having to have the excess offloaded into the shared memory.

Do you truly believe in the numbers from anandtech? It would be funny to see how 580 SLI is beaten by 6950 CF in certain games then:



As I have said, you would never be able to know the worst case scenario for each game simply from benchmarks and reviews.

1) The time interval to calculate min fps may vary a lot between benchmarks. For instance, if you have 0 fps for 0.1 seconds, and 60 fps for another 0.1 seconds, the min fps may be either 0 for 0.1-second interval, or 30 fps for 0.2-second interval.

2) The benchmarks does not necessarily cover the most stressful scenes of each game. It is not always like how your 2 x 560 Ti 1GB was beaten by my 2 x 6950 2GB by only 27% during Metro2033benchmark.exe - if you really play the game through (hint: Chapter 4 Child, which uses 1.5GB vram at 1080p), it may be a huge difference on the average fps.

That's why I say it's not sufficient to justify from review numbers, otherwise my list is meaningless.