Realistically, is 1GB of VRAM not enough for 1080p with NO Anti Aliasing nowadays?

[MaxAwesome]

Jagged lines never bothered me so I rarely, if ever, use AA.

I do like maxing out things like texture quality, shadows, SSAO and the likes, basically every graphical setting besides AA.

AA is just an afterthough for me, so I don't really care.

What is your opinion?

 

[FordGT90Concept]

It's texture buffering that matters most in terms of video memory. It varies for every game.

 

[W1zzard]

1 GB is enough for 1080p with 4xAA in pretty much all titles. check my club3d hd 7850 1 gb review

 

[Zubasa]

Just about every current generation high-end cards have at 2GB of memory anyways.

 

[NdMk2o1o]

Still rocking 1280Mb vRAM with my 570 and I game at 2560x1440 plays BF3 ultra 40-60FPS and Metro 2033 30+ FPS maxxed though I have no need for AA at this res and don't run any games with HD texture packs etc like Skyrim

 

[MaxAwesome]

1 GB is enough for 1080p with 4xAA in pretty much all titles. check my club3d hd 7850 1 gb review

Wow! This actually makes me feel much better about my Radeon HD 6870.

The 1GB HD 7850 was consistently faster @ 1200p than the 2GB version.

Thanks, man!

 

[INSTG8R]

I hate the "jaggies" AA is the first thing I turn on tho I don't go crazy with it. 2x or a max of 4x for me is enough. If you wanna go crazy with the eye candy then more VRAM for sure.

 

[MaxAwesome]

I hate the "jaggies" AA is the first thing I turn on tho I don't go crazy with it. 2x or a max of 4x for me is enough. If you wanna go crazy with the eye candy then more VRAM for sure.

I'd rather have everything turned up and sacrifice AA. I believe AA is one of the biggest memory hogs, currently. Or at least, one of the biggest.

But as Wizzard pointed out, at my resolution, 1GB is more than enough, even if I choose to use AA.

So, it's all good!

 

[natr0n]

never have issues with 1 GB, only bf3 can max it out if i set things high enough

2048x1152 with AA on most titles

 

[Wrigleyvillain]

1 GB is enough for 1080p with 4xAA in pretty much all titles. check my club3d hd 7850 1 gb review

Well at 1200P BF3 uses about 1.4GB on my system (4x MSAA, Ultra except shadows). At least that's what AB OSD tells me.

 

[CounterZeus]

I think most cards with 1GB VRAM aren't strong enough to get higher fps even with 2GB if you crank up the settings anyway. So what I'm trying to say is that the bottleneck with these cards probably is not the memory size.

 

[RejZoR]

Wow! This actually makes me feel much better about my Radeon HD 6870.

The 1GB HD 7850 was consistently faster @ 1200p than the 2GB version.

Thanks, man!

Also be aware that some games automatically scale textures to fit into VRAM. So, if the card is the same but has scaled down textures, of course it will work faster than the one that uses 2GB of textures, meaning it has to process twice as much textures during rendering.

 

[Flibolito]

Also be aware that some games automatically scale textures to fit into VRAM. So, if the card is the same but has scaled down textures, of course it will work faster than the one that uses 2GB of textures, meaning it has to process twice as much textures during rendering.

This is very true BF3 is a game that does this very well.

 

[MaxAwesome]

Also be aware that some games automatically scale textures to fit into VRAM. So, if the card is the same but has scaled down textures, of course it will work faster than the one that uses 2GB of textures, meaning it has to process twice as much textures during rendering.

This is very true BF3 is a game that does this very well.

Does this happen even if I set texture quality to the highest setting available?

 

[NC37]

Years ago reports came out how little images change with FSAA when you hit the 1080 res area. You don't need 8x or higher AA. Heck even 4x is borderline. So using 1GB VRAM, with exception of titles like BF3, is plenty. I mostly only use 2x in games. Benefit of a little smoother image without the heavier performance hit of 4x. But if I was in 720 res area I'd be using 4x or higher.

 

[Flibolito]

Yes even with textures on highest setting the game will lower the res of certain textures, usually far away ones in order to keep the game running smoothly. This in turn causes the gpu to crank out the frames a tiny bit faster. It's a safety mechanism to prevent huge frame rate drop that we got in older games when you just plain ran out of Vram.

 

[Flibolito]

I need AA much more on my 37 TV than I do on my monitor because of screen size. Both are 1080p. 1920x1080 on 22inch or less probably would need almost none since pixels per inch is very high.

 

[Nordic]

I have been hitting 1500-1900mb used in ns2. Don't know about other games. That is on highest settings though.

 

[Frenzic]

I find that using AA blurs textures in most games, just don't find them as crisp with AA enabled. I dunno mite just be my eyes haha

 

[Flibolito]

My BF3 journey as far as memory goes is as follows. I played a 580 1.5GB and still play on a 480 (heavily OC'ed) 1.5GB. Both systems played it very similar. The 580 was then replaced by another 580 but this time a Classified ultra 3GB. Played about the same since i could only get 950MHz out of the card which was only slightly higher than my original 580 but it had twice the Vram. BF3 used to use right about 1400-1500MB and on the classified it picked up sometimes to 1600-1700 since more was available. I run 1080p Ultra settings but post processing AA off since just MSAA is much sharper and better without the extra blur filter. I noticed a small increase in the graphics going to the larger memory buffer especially on caspian in the distance. The 680 2GB uses about 1500-1700 as it should so it seems for my setting that's all that is required. For anyone short on memory try turning off the post proc. AA (MSAA is more of a hog but it actually is a good AA) it might free up just a little mem and make things look sharper. Just my experiences with BF3 and a few different Nvidia cards.

 

[pantherx12]

I find that using AA blurs textures in most games, just don't find them as crisp with AA enabled. I dunno mite just be my eyes haha

Only the post proesssing kinds and FSAA and SSAA would blur the image as far as I know.

Everything else just detects the edges of polygons.

 

[Widjaja]

Depends on the resolution and how optimized the game is.

Some times no matter how good your system is the game will run like shit and most people saying they have it running great are in denial to you and themselves because they forked out so much for a system which is still fail with certain games which will never run smoothly.

At the moment 1GB should not be an issue with being able to play games at enjoyable frame rates.
Just keep in mind that there are some games out there which will never run smoothly but smoother with a super high end graphics cards.

 

[Flibolito]

SSAA should I think be the sharpest of all. Super-Sampling renders the scene at double the resolution to detect edges even better aka ubersampling in witcher 2. thats why it normaly runs so bad but there should be about as much blur as MSAA

 

[happita]

I run BF3 on my 5850 1GB, but I run every single setting at its lowest. I do however get a steady 70-90 fps. The game still looks 10x better than its console variant believe me. I can only imagine what it's gonna look like when I upgrade my card though

 

[pantherx12]

SSAA should I think be the sharpest of all. Super-Sampling renders the scene at double the resolution to detect edges even better aka ubersampling in witcher 2. thats why it normaly runs so bad but there should be about as much blur as MSAA

Did you ever turn on uber sampling when you played Witcher 2?

It blured textures.

Because it can't differentiated between edges and details of things.

So the entire scene like you say gets Anti-aliasing rather than selectively. So edges will look outstanding and jagged edge free.

But you get a loose overall clarity.