does the amount of GPU GDDR5 make huge performance difference?

I was wondering, does the amount of GPU GDDR5 make huge performance difference?

let's say DDR5 2GB vs 4GB for same card. ex. GTX680m

is there a huge performance difference?

thanks.

 

No, unless you play in 2,560 x 1,600 with very high settings

 

I second Cloudfire.
Amount of GPU RAM is not important to performance because most come with more than enough capacity to accommodate games at 1080p as is.

The only area huge portions of vram might be useful would be in professional programs that can offload rendering scenes to the GPU.

 

2GB vs 4GB, nope, 1 vs 2 on a GTX680m, can make a difference in some rare cases (heavily modded skyrim for one), but 2GB vs 4GB, not right now.

 

Depends on your usage patterns. Traditionally, more vRAM only really benefitted SLI systems since most single GFX cards lack the rendering power to fully utilize doubled vRAM complements. A case example, my Desktop runs the GTX 570 1280mb RAM in SLI, the GTX570 is roughly equivalent to the 680m.
Basically on one card, my framerates are already somewhat below 30fps when more than 1gb of RAM is utilized (this was on BF3 multiplayer with MSAA x2). In SLI, my FPS was consistently 60 (MSAAx2) but as soon as I cranked the settings to MSAAx4, there was heaps of stuttering and the VRAM usage capped at 1275mb exactly.
I also like to multitask between multiple games but I get craploads of stutter when I have Sins of a Solar Empire (200mb vRAM usage) running in the background and BF3 on at the same time. I suspect the multitask stutter is because of lack of vRAM but it could also be thread conflict.

That being said, there are rare games that won't choke a single GFX card's rendering power even right up to the vRAM limit and the main symptoms you will notice is a periodic stuttering (maybe about 20 seconds apart) as the GPU is waiting for the data from the swapfile. The most well known example right now is Skyrim, its not particularly rendering intense or vRAM intense at stock but you can tweak the game world with so many mods that a lot of stuff has to be cached and ready in the vRAM.

I don't think lack of vRAM would directly benefit FPS (provided you already have ample rendering power) but it definitely affects smoothness and consistency. The main scenarios where you would want more vRAM is:
1. High resolution/Multi- gaming
2. Multiple intense games simultaneously
3. SLI systems otherwise you are leaving consistency on the table if not also performance
4. Skyrim with texture mods

 

No even then it's not tapped into. The ultra crazy Nvidia Surround people, the ones who use 3+ monitors, don't cross the 3GB Vram threshold, so 4GB is pointless. Not to mention, the GPUs have too little memory bandwidth to make good enough use of that amount of Vram.

 

It's kind of ironic. Most laptops have way too much GDDR5 they'll never touch, the one laptop that could make use of it (keyword: Retina) has had its VRAM cut in half.

 

Haha, most laptops having way too much VRAM is nothing new. My N50's 9650M GT has 1GB of VRAM on a 128-bit bus, like the bus has the required width to fill up that 1GB . It isn't as much of an aberration as a 8400M GT with a 64-bit bus sporting 1GB of VRAM. The amount of VRAM is all marketing, a lot of OEMs put too much and Apple cuts it close or doesn't put enough in many cases (imo, and it got better recently).

 

it has much more than the required bus width to fill up 1GB of VRAM. If you want to fill that 1GB in one cycle then you only need 32bit bus, which can fill up to 4GB actually.

but to the OPs question: once you have enough VRAM there's no performance benefit to have more VRAM. Currently I consider 2GB to be enough for anything that you might do with the computer.

 

Why did Nvidia put 4gb in some of the 680m's compared to 2gb in others? I can understand that marketing higher vram may appear better for consumers who buy their computers at Best Buy. However, those that buy 680m's and similar cards, in my opinion, pay more attention to frames per second than total vram, so tossing in an additional 2gb of vram seems to be pointless. Is GDDR5 so abundant that it costs more to store it than to toss it on a card just to make it look pretty?

 

Its a marketing ploy so they can charge more money for the same technology - even though it won't affect performance.

On top of that, vRAM chips (if I'm not mistaken) should be stupidly cheap... and yet gpu's with double vRAM capacity seem to be priced A LOT higher than what they should be (lets not even delve into what the actual price tags of these gpu's should be).

Manufacturers should be putting in enough vRAM appropriate to the underlying gpu hardware capabilities and price it accordingly.

Right now they are milking as much as possible and relying on people being ill-informed to get away with present business practices.

Besides, mobile gpu's are basically desktop chips that have reduced performance due to thermal constraints - if anything they shouldn't cost more than the destkop counterparts... but of course, the term 'mobile' here would be the prime factor the price is high.

 

For a good idea of how much VRAM costs, take a look at desktop GPUs which are identical except for differing amounts of RAM - in other words, GPUs that are sold in 1 GB and 2 GB editions.

The HD 7850 for example puts an upper limit on how much GDDR5 costs: no more than $20/GB, and probably significantly less since AMD and their partners likely have higher margins on the 2 GB edition.

 

lol, don't even get in to the argument of cost of GDDR3 vs GDDR5. Its probably $20 between the same capacities at best. To this day I'm still extremely annoyed that my W110er has GDDR3 instead of GDDR5 since this all but eliminates the possibility of gaming on an external monitor with decent FPS. Even friggin ultrabooks with their constrained thermal/power profiles are getting GDDR5 for their crappy NVIDIA 640s/630s.

 

I thought GDDR3 had been phased out in 2009-2010 with the launches of Cypress and then Fermi. Didn't know it was still being manufactured...

 

The GTX680m is not powerful enough to need more than 2GB, even 1GB is good enough for the vast majority of games you'll be able to play on your GTX680m.There just isn't really enough processing power there to need more RAM.

 

what does GPU processing power having to do with the amount of video RAM installed for that GPU to work with ?

almost same relationship between CPU and RAM, so it's like saying an i3 is not powerful enough to work with 16GB RAM installed.

there are slow GPUs our there fitted with 1GB VRAM, and there are much faster GPUs that operate with half that. Or should I post examples with 1 and 2 GB VRAM instead...

 

Cpus can complete a task and the end product be the same, gpus need to render real time so situations requiring more than a certain amount of ram will run too slow anyway to be useful (eg getting 4fps instead of 2fps). So each gpu has an ideal amount of ram.

Also high performance gddr5 is still not that cheap.

 

256mb HYNIX DDR5 Module averages 5-8 ea most high end cards use 16 modules or 8 so yea even at 16 max would be $128 of course when bought in bulk rates go down

128mb Modules I seen are abour 4-6 ea

 

Unless you run at a very high resolution while gaming, then the amount of vRAM needed is not that big. If you run triple monitor setup or more with very high resolution then the vRAM comes into play.