8970m 2GB vs 4GB

Been looking for my replacement laptop for the last few days, and I stumble upon the two versions of the new AMD card.
Now I know that I'm going AMD again, but I feel myself getting increasingly irritated by reading discussions about the puny 6% performance gain over the 7970m and all that. So into the discussion comes the added memory of the 4GB version of the 8970m. The usual comments : You don't need it, no game uses more than 2GB, blah, blah.....
To my knowledge, if you plan on running 1 or 2 extra high resolution monitors for example, 4GB will definitely come in handy, depending on the memory bandwidth. Also I wonder if the gaming - part of the arguments against the 4GB are somewhat flawed ? What about antialiasing? Wouldn't it help having the 4GB?

Besides, some of us DO use our laptops for working, carrying them around in our backpack, replacing the desktop on certain occasions. What about CAD - work, rendering, etc..

What I really wish for is for some impartial with a pseudonym to shed some light in the eyes of us all, and me in particular.

 

2GB in my 6990m isnt nearly enough for Skyrim with textures mods, and NO AA. (1080 1 monitor)
I would buy the 780m, but either way, go with 4gb, especialy now with the new Console gen wich wont restrain PC games so much now, and u get some peace of mind with a future proof hardware.

 

Check this out -

http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Video-Card-Performance-2GB-vs-4GB-Memory-154/

This is for the desktop 680 - which is more powerful and could likely use more memory better than the 8970m. It is a triple monitor setup also.

It is possible to make a difference in games, but by the time you have that much memory loaded up, I doubt you have enough framerate to play a game either way.

For CAD, I have no clue....

 

Thanks for the link. Doesn't touch so much on the antialiasing subject. He barely mentions it in that article, and what about the new console adaptations + the modded games in general ? Actually I'm getting the big p375sm with 8970m , 4gb crossfire. Obvious, but good point on the framerate there. Can't deny that one. As for the p375sm I just wanna try it out. I may be one of the few that actually enjoyed myself with the 7970m the past year

 

Personally, If you have to chose between the 2, it never hurts to get the 4gb version. However. if you already have a 7970m, I wouldn't recommend an upgrade to the 8970m even if it is the 4gb version. Why?

1) Current benchmarks are only showing a 6% performance gain.

2) Next gen is still a mystery. Until those games arrive, no one can be certain just if this card will cut it or not? Yes, 4gb will help, but will the current processing power of this card hold? Could it be that the processing power of the card will bottleneck the VRAM? No can say for certain until we start seeing those games actually run on the card.

IMHO, I would not even recommend even upgrading to the 780m if you have a 680m or a 7970m. I don't think the 20% performance boost is worth it. But that is just me. If you've got your mind all set on an upgrade, you know no one here can convince you otherwise

 

And suffice it to say if you had a 1GB card in there the 1920x1080 performance also likely wouldn't budge either. Just because a game uses 4GB of textures doesn't mean you need 4GB of vRAM either. There's no way it can process that much vRAM and have a good framerate. Even if a game requires 10GB of textures, it will load in what it needs when it needs it and use system RAM as a cache or reserve. It's only when the performance of the card exceeds what the vRAM can hold that it will become an issue.

AA is really vRAM bandwidth dependent more than anything else, and depends on kind of AA. FXAA will just sacrifice GPU perforamnce, FSAA and SSAA will hit the RAM harder. Depends on the game and scene too. I just ran Tomb Raider bench with noAA and it used 730MB vRAM. FXAA used same amount. 4xSSAA used 960MB. Unigine Valley must use FSAA because no AA it takes 450MB but 8x AA takes 850MB.

 

Doesn't matter. Just look at desktop cards that stomp all over mobile. They come with 2GB still. The 4GB from Nvidia is just marketing since they seem to think mobile gamers have half the brain of desktop gamers and the biggest chump consumers who will buy anything they charge, even for features that make no difference. You can find plenty of tests and benchmarks showing even 1GB being enough for GPUs. Seems AMD is starting to think that as well. Maybe with AMD and Nvidia getting their butts handed to them in the real money making mobile market and desktop gaming dying to consoles, tablets etc, the last bastion of snake oil marketing and "exclusivity" prices for them is you, me, us, laptop gamers.

Go ahead and pay your premium price for 6% improvement on what is already mediocre performance and a 90 day warranty, with shoddy manufacturing and soldering, workmanship from AMD and believe 4GB makes it worth it for you. Have fun, those 4 GB of ram will surely make it worthwhile. And to think PS4 will have 8GB of GDDR5 while we are stuck with awesome DDR3 for our system ram. Whatever. If EVGA saw the type of workmanship that are in these Clevo AMD cards, they probably would murder whoever was manufacturing them, Foxconn, or maybe it's someone worse. Hell Apple wouldn't tolerate it, no one would, except Clevo and their consumers. Seemed Dell/MSI didn't, just Clevo.

 

Indeed, if if have a 7970m dont worry about upgrade, you can stick to it for 2 more years easly.
About this 1GB being enough is bull. BF3 uses about 1.5GB, My Skyrim with no AA but texture mods stutters in heavy places like Whiterun cuz 2GB simply isnt enough.
4 GB wouldnt hurt if u were to buy a new notebook, but if u already have a 7970m it isnt worth it for the tiny 6% gains, and few games that will use more than 2GB. Wait untill next gens for real improvement and THEN u chose a 4GB one.

 

With my GT 650M, BioShock Infinite uses 1.3GB of VRAM at 1366x768. Sometimes it's surprising how much memory games can gobble up.

 

And it stutters because of RAM or how do you quantify that? Have you run it with same card with 4GB to see if it matters? If the cost difference is negligible then get the 4GB because no it can't hurt, but not really necessary. And my GTX 460 plays BF3 just fine despite it having only 1GB RAM. Amount of RAM has nothing to do with amount of textures, period.

 

I have 8GB ram so its enough, my 2GB vram though is being fully used acording to Afterburner, even inside Breezehome its about 1.5GB of vram, so...

 

My point is that it's not utilizing all that RAM simultaneously. Only a portion of it. So if you had 1GB vRAM it could still make use of the 2GB+ of textures, it just wouldn't store them locally in your vRAM. It will be staged in your system RAM and pulled in as needed. You could have 8GB vRAM and 8GB of textures but it doesn't mean your GPU will make use of it all or have anything to do with performance.

 

The VRAM needs are also very game-engine dependant. For an instance, a game engine that requires that a white PNG texture of 2048x2048 that occupies just a few KB in your disk (since it is compressed and has a lot of color redundancy) to be loaded and uncompressed to the VRAM will fill the VRAM by 2048x2048x32 bits (considering 32 bits per pixel), meaning just over 16 MBs . If the game engine allows for the texture to be kept compressed, like in a DXT5 format, it can signify four times (four!) less VRAM used. So yes, as hardware improves, so do some CG algorithms, also allowing for more demanding assets to be running with our current resources. There are even some techniques that use LOD (Level of Detail) that will only load every "nth" pixel of a texture to memory (subsampling) effectively taking up even less resources, whilst keeping quality at reasonable levels . Same for geometry (also loaded to the VRAM), it can be loaded in a compressed way, or not. So really, a game that fills your VRAM isn't necessarily a "hardware-heavy" game. It may easily be poorly cooded or optimized. Additionally, the compression level of the VRAM can increase in cases where the available VRAM is less. You can see that in your RAM usage as well. If you have, say 2 GBs of RAM, you may notice that when starting windows, you have a little over 1 GB of ram used. You then exchange that RAM for 16GBs and now you notice that Windows is taking up 3GBs of RAM with the same processes. Well, Windows is also compressing and decompressing RAM information, whenever needed, ensuring that you can still keep your system as responsive as possible (however this compressing and decompressing takes time, but not as much as using ZRAM or a SWAP drive).

td;dr - 4 GBs of VRAM will most likely result in little to no benefit with current top of the line games. A good card with 2GB of VRAM and a good memory bandwidth should outclass one with more VRAM but significantly slower bandwidth in texture loading and unloading, even when running under full load.

 

Thanks guys
As long as the price difference is negligible I will go for the 4GB, but mind you I do not use NVIDIA as they are too expensive/Not worth the premium. I do think AMD mobile cards are worth their price though, and whatever truth about desktop over laptop, you cant drag the desktop anywhere..... I almost NEVER use my computer at home, so of course I will consider a mobile platform. And I'm not going to get any work done on a ps4 ;-) As for the rants about Clevo : I have had a lot of laptops during the past 10-15 years, but I actually think the Clevo's are better than most. I like the enduro platform. I've enjoyed my 7970m. More power when U need it, easy to maintain/upgrade. (Ok, the keyboards are pretty bad) But, enough of that.
Will it or will it not benefit me to have a 4GB card when running vm's and Maya, Flash,Visual studio, Autodesk revit on 2 extra monitors(2560x1440) off of the 8970m(enduro) with the high performance settings on for most of the apps ? The tests referred to earlier in this thread suggest that this would actually be a case scenario where you would benefit from more video memory. I understand that we clearly use our equipment for different purposes though.

 

For cad it may well benefit you.