Is 960m with 2GB vram still good for todays and newer games?

Now that Nvidia revealed pascals GPU in price and performance recently, I am starting to regret ordering my Asus ROG gl551 entry level gaming laptop too soon..

What this computer has at stock specs is the i5-6300HQ, 8GB DDR4 ram, 1TB HDD, and the Nvidia 960m 2gb VRAM for $869. It came bundled with a Asus rog messenger bag, headphones, and a mouse pad so I figured that would be a great starter gaming laptop rig. I felt tempted to get the 4GB vram of this chip to future proof it for a couple more years but that would exceed my preferable budget. I didn't want to wait for the Pascal chips since I speculated that it'll be costly at about more than $1000+ for notebooks with these new GPUs but it seems like it won't be the case.

Anyway, is the 960m with 2GB vram enough for with today's and newer games? My games of interest would be like battlefield 4, dying light, just cause 3, tomb raider, MMO-RPGs and some indies from steam. I would say I am a casual gamer since I am fine with playing on playable framerates (to me) at around 20 FPS at minimum on 720p to 1080p at the most. Textures would be ranging from lows to mediums, while extra things like AA will be either be turned off or set on low.

This is going to be a big upgrade from my (2012) HP Dv6-6000 laptop that runs with AMD A6-3420m with integrated 6520g graphics, so gaming with the older and newer 2-3 generation of games will be new to me.

 

If you're OK with dropping resolution and in-game settings, your 960M will be fine for a couple years.

 

Honestly I'd cancel and wait for the GTX 1060M. Waiting sucks, but it's going to be a huge upgrade over the 960M, and will give you years of longevity.

Isn't a few months more worth the waiting, when in the end it benefits you a few years. Rumor currently has it as a 75% faster card, that's dang like having 960Ms in SLI!

 

Agreed, wait for a while.. The 1060M will troll the 960M and you'll really regret it OP when this happens..

 

Ugh. I kind of want to return it but then again, it already has been processed and returning it won't come free and be some what costly from this seller. I will just stick with it for the time being since this is going to be for casual use like web browsing, a bit gaming, movies, and for school. Nothing too intensive.

Anyway, my reason of asking this question for vram in games is because I never actually got the chance to fiddle with in game settings pertaining involving vram, since I only have used integrated APU graphics by AMD along with some overclocking/under-volting of the processor. I have read on some articles that uses borderline of at least 2+ GB of vram at the lowest graphics setting. An example is games like dying light is not optimized on mobile platforms (according to steam) and utilizes way more than 2 gb vram (reported by other players). But when I go on youtube and watch videos of Dying Light playing on similar graphics card but on med-high, it seems to play fine and actually still looks great to me. The info seems to be conflicting with each other and I wonder if this vram thing is all in ultra high def gamers mentality.

 

Honestly, VRAM depends entirely on your graphics settings and resolution. 2GB is fine for the 960m because with that GPU, you're not going to be running higher resolutions or higher graphical settings in the first place so you wouldn't benefit from more VRAM. A better GPU would benefit from more VRAM which is why better GPUs come with more VRAM.

 

Wrong.

You can toss huge resolution textures and shadowmaps on cards like that and they can render them just fine. I will agree that some settings like lighting and ambient occlusion or pure resolution aren't going to be turned up with the 960M, and those do affect vRAM some, but not nearly as much as texture/shadow resolutions do. Black Ops 3 won't even let you turn on "high" textures on a 2GB card, for example. Have two 2GB 770s in SLI? You could max BO3 if it'd let you. But you'll never turn textures beyond medium because you'll be vRAM limited. Or the same with Shadows of Mordor... using its Ultra textures option is possible on 3GB and 4GB cards despite it asking for 6GB, but you're going to have a bad time on a 2GB card.

 

I'm pretty sure if you're talking about the same settings on 1080p versus the same settings on 4k, the 4k is going to use a lot more VRAM.

Hey look, everyone else on the internet agrees that using higher resolutions would use a lot more VRAM: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2491083/vram-matter.html

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/44829-how-much-vram-do-you-actually-need/

With all of this pointless arguing said, I'm sure OP will be fine with only 2GB of VRAM, especially based on the information provided from the links I posted.

 

This. I agree is most situations the 4gb may not matter but I've noticed in a few games having that extra ram buffer is a great help. Go play Rainbow Six Seige with ultra textures. Using them impacts FPS very little if at all but eats up a ton of vram. I find myself nearly maxing out my 4gb 960m. The game looks great with them and impacts perf very little. The 2gb card wouldn't be able to use them.

 

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/198568-the-video-ram-information-guide/

 

There are also a few games like Wolfenstein New Order, where it's not only textures, but the higher graphics settings do not even appear in the settings menu unless you have a specific amount of VRAM (in this case, 3GB)

 

COD eats vRAM like nothing.. Advanced Warfare ate 5.5GB of the 6GB in my 970M... More vRAM definitely helps IMO... Especially with new games..

 

Ghosts and AW don't really devour vRAM properly. They just like filling it up. Black Ops 3 however needs a:

- 2GB card to use "medium" textures
- 4GB card to use "high" textures
- 6GB card to use "extra" textures

 

COD is a poorly coded and ported piece of puke. It has been that way since the release after modern warfare.

 

Advanced Warfare is the only COD I ever tried, but I was rather impressed with how scalable it was. There were settings enabling smooth performance while playing the game on an ancient potato.

 

He only COD I play still anymore is COD2, my clan has 4 servers online still and they stay full.

 

All artificial limitations imposed by the game. There's no reason it shouldn't or couldn't run. Wish I still had a 970m 6GB because I benched several games that supposedly needed more than 3GB vRAM but the 3GB card ran just as well if not better than the 970m with 6GB vRAM despite the 6GB card showing 4GB+ being utilized.

960m with 2GB vRAM and 970m with 3GB vRAM are the sweet spot for the performance of these cards at 1080p. Anything extra is just added vRAM for the sake of having it.

 

DOOM requires 5GB VRAM to unlock the "Nightmare + Ultra" highest graphic settings, although apparently the difference in visuals is not much compared to the "Ultra" setting.

 

Well-said. The 860M/960M GPUs work best at medium-high settings on most games to achieve (what I consider) a playable frame-rate of 45-60 FPS at 1080p. Even if the VRAM is slightly exceeded, 2GB is quite literally perfect for the GM107.

 

BO3's limits aren't artificial. I ran the game with "extra" before they patched it so I could only use "high" and the texture performance actually broke consistently (in multiplayer, not Zombies or Single Player). Here is an example of "extra" texture quality where you can see what I'm talking about. My gun and player textures loaded correctly, however the game's textures broke entirely, and this happened consistently... Treyarch LITERALLY just did not optimize the game.

I remember your testing with the 3GB vRAM, however. I know that some games just cache the memory and don't actually "need" the vRAM they want (why I mentioned 4GB cards being able to handle Shadows of Mordor, for example). However ID Tech 5 games like the Wolfenstein games will NOT allow you to use ultra textures without a 3GB card, and in that case, forcing it on a 2GB card will actually break the game and cause crashes. Here's some more proof for the recent ID Tech 5 games.

I agree with 3GB being a good baseline for cards in that power bracket. But not 2GB, just because of stuff like that for BO3. The problem is the card is 2GB or 4GB... it doesn't have a 3GB option, whereas you could argue that 6GB on a 970M is a bit overkill. The stupid part is that devs are turning up texture-related resolutions and not actually drawing anything better, which means that more memory is good without necessarily needing more power. Go figure.

I still stand by my statements of "if you could get more vRAM without it otherwise hindering the performance of the card in some way, grab it". I'll add on "don't sacrifice other components for more vRAM if you already have 3-4GB" too.