Thursday, November 5th 2015
Black Ops III: 12 GB RAM and GTX 980 Ti Not Enough
This year's installment to the Call of Duty franchise, Black Ops III, has just hit stores, and is predictably flying off shelves. As with every ceremonial annual release, Black Ops III raises the visual presentation standards for the franchise. There is, however, one hitch with the way the game deals with system memory amounts as high as 12 GB and video memory amounts as high as 8 GB. This hitch could possibly be the reason behind the stuttering issues many users are reporting.
In our first play-through of the game with its highest possible settings on our personal gaming machines - equipped with a 2560 x 1600 pixels display, Core i7 "Haswell" quad-core CPU, 12 GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX 980 Ti graphics card, NVIDIA's latest Black Ops III Game Ready driver 385.87, and Windows 7 64-bit to top it all off, we noticed that the game was running out of memory. Taking a peek at Task Manager revealed that in "Ultra" settings (and 2560 x 1600 resolution), the game was maxing out memory usage within our 12 GB, not counting the 1.5-2 GB used up by the OS and essential lightweight tasks (such as antivirus).
We also noticed game crashes as little as 10 seconds into gameplay, on a machine with 8 GB of system memory and a GTX 980 Ti.
What's even more interesting is its video memory behavior. The GTX 980 Ti, with its 6 GB video memory, was developing a noticeable stutter. This stutter disappeared on the GTX TITAN X, with its 12 GB video memory, in which memory load shot up from maxed out 6 GB on the GTX 980 Ti, to 8.4 GB on the video memory. What's more, system memory usage dropped with the GTX TITAN X, down to 8.3 GB.
On Steam Forums, users report performance issues that don't necessarily point at low FPS (frames per second), but stuttering, especially at high settings. Perhaps the game needs better memory management. Once we installed 16 GB RAM in the system, the game ran buttery-smooth with our GTX 980 Ti.
In our first play-through of the game with its highest possible settings on our personal gaming machines - equipped with a 2560 x 1600 pixels display, Core i7 "Haswell" quad-core CPU, 12 GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX 980 Ti graphics card, NVIDIA's latest Black Ops III Game Ready driver 385.87, and Windows 7 64-bit to top it all off, we noticed that the game was running out of memory. Taking a peek at Task Manager revealed that in "Ultra" settings (and 2560 x 1600 resolution), the game was maxing out memory usage within our 12 GB, not counting the 1.5-2 GB used up by the OS and essential lightweight tasks (such as antivirus).
168 Comments on Black Ops III: 12 GB RAM and GTX 980 Ti Not Enough
Definitely not even thinking about picking this game up, especially after seeing this crap lol.
Certainly not upgrading anything in my system to play a new call of duty game.
The originals were amazing games. But like I said, its just a money grab now.
I would like to see a remake of a WW2 game, only problem is they will never make another call of duty with the COD2 layout. I WANT a custom server browser..... Not some lame matchmaking non-sense.Agreed, this is just absurd.
I remember playing the Demo over and over at the time, was such an epic experience. As bad as WW2 was, it just has an awesome vibe to it.
Because if those are the specs, not many people can actually run that. I mean, I have 32GB RAM so I don't care, but graphic card is still "just" 4GB (GTX 980). If you want to target the broadest target public, you can't have specs like this. Or it has to look like nothing we've seen to date. Frankly, I doubt that will be the case...
COD BLOPS3: the new Crysis.
It would be fun to try it with my i3/8GB/GTX670/W10Pro PC. :)Crysis wasn't so hungry for RAM/VRAM, just GPU horsepower.
Than I did with an I5 3570k with a R9 280x..
I'm not sure why...it stuttered like crazy with the 3570...I just figured it was a beta bug
COD BLOPS3: needs more RAM than Chrome!
sorry I'm in a meme mood
moving along :)
that one put the challenge a bit higher tho (ABOUT TWICE HIGHER???? o_O )
edit... about vRAM ... HELL!?!? 6gb is not enough ... hello 8gb 390/x/290/x...
well i have a 980 4gb but i am not interested in COD games anymore (although Ghost was fun when i played it )
It would explain a lot :D.
Console kiddies will gobble this up as always as that's the bigger market... but still... this series just needs to go away for awhile to give itself time to reinvent. They are just snagging and grabbing from other titles now.
All these perks/attachments/killing streaks are just lame, you don't need any actual skill to get first place, its basically who can out cheese the other player, this is the main reason I stopped playing. The original games actually took teamwork/skill
If only, they would just make a simplistic barebones shooter like the originals with a custom server browser.... I would buy it in a heartbeat.
Oh I missed that bottom comment about 16gb of ram and the GTX 980ti working fine... Ok so we now have 6 Cards that can run it efficiently on Ultra.Eh yea, I actually like the Black Ops/WaW games just for the zombies personally as the multiplayer got to boring and pretty easy if you know the right ways to play it (Meaning right guns, positions, etc).