Quote Originally Posted by Rollo View Post
Your sig says you have a Phenom II and a 1GB 4850, no offense intended, but it sort of contradicts your statement. Not saying my 990X and 2GB GTX680 SLi and 2500K and HD7970 (both with 25 X 16 panels) puts me in the .1% either, but apparently all types of users "live here".

It's sort of a moot point to talk about VRAM limitations, because no matter how much you have, you can exceed it in a variety of ways. So if I say "Nuh uh! I can run my Skyrim at 25 X16 with the texture packs because I have 3GB VRAM on my 7970!" I'm just a guy waiting to hear "But I can run Skyrim in 3d at 57X10 with 4XAA because I have 4GB of VRAM on my 680!".

It's a pointless argument that can never be won, and as noted, we have no good tool for measuring VRAM use.

You have several tools. Not all of them are perfect in all situations, but the fact remains there are several which produce relatively good results as long as you have the faculties available to interpret the results.

Here are 3 off the top of my head.

Fraps
Rivatuner and derivatives (msi afterburner for example)
Asus GPU Tweak

Then some games (Far Cry, Serious Sam, etc) also have in-game methods.


As a 3rd option you can visually test and mentally comprehend your benchmarks. If you get 3fps at 1920x1080 with 4xAA but 30fps with no AA then you've probably either run out of VRAM or the game engine is poorly designed for streaming of compartmentalized data.