Video memory usage

I am wondering which is currently a good amount of VRAM needed for a video card in order to drive properly DCS in 4k.

Asking this because I saw that my GTX1080 is using all 8Gb VRAM and sometimes I am experiencing stutters. I blame for this the amount of VRAM and I am curious how a GTX1080 TI with 11Gb is handling this aspect.

Well, not really a good comparison, but 3440x1440p uses only 6.3GB of Vram on medium-high settings in 2.0 on my 1080 Ti...

But it uses 10 Gigs of system RAM at the same time...

But the 1080 Ti in general is better at driving anything in 4K, it´s not just the VRAM, it´s got the faster core, too.

I am convinced TI is quite better than standard 1080...

If you can try high to ultra settings and come back with some values about VRAM consumption will be even greater.

PS: TI does have slower core speeds but higher number of cores.

I'd say 8Gb is minimum since I experienced already two times where not even 8 Gb is enough to play DCS on 1080p with medium to high settings.

I hope my 980GTX will somehow carry me over to the 16GB cards era ;)

Those 4GB were plenty for 1.5.x and 1440p but I already see the limits over Vegas with fps in the 50's with high settings and Extreme Visibility.

VRAM needs be made expandable, like Vega did or some other way...or a 8x NVMe Raid-0 with TR and 28GB/sec ;) LoL

8 x NVMe on TR : http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/eight-nvme-m2-ssds-in-raid-on-x399-threadripper-reach-28-gbs.html

I am just looking for some numbers here... anybody who can provide them?

I am assessing if is worth for me to go for a TI from a 1080 or not. Numbers will help. Thank you.

3.7GB (at 4K) for DCS1.

Strangely, I seem to be using between 9.6GB - 12GB of video RAM in NTTR with a GTX 970 (which has 4GB VRAM) running at 1440p.

This was measured using RCtrl + Pause x 2 in DCS. That seems much much higher than many of the figures above. Is it right?

I just got my 1080Ti and I do remember that I used up all + some more of its 11GB when flying online.

There are also flights with less VRAM usage, but I have also seen it exceed my 11GB.

well, who knows

Thanks BitMaster. I am thinking about upgrading soon and was wondering if there was a sweetspot for vram. But it seems that almost whatever I buy in the 1070/1080 range all the vram will get used up. So that seems to be normal, rather than something to worry too much about. I am wondering what sort of vram capacity I should be aiming for for good performance?

I dont think the VRAM in the DCS frame counter thing, is actual VRAM. Seems more like a combined mem use, system and vram, and I wouldnt trust it to be exact either.

Ive had it show 30Gb at some point, while building a mission. Every time I would load in to check, it would just increase.

And during that, I would check my Asus GPU Tweak II program, and it showed 5.2Gb VRAM in use at that point, and it remained quite constant.

I use MSI Afterburner and RST to graph, log and read those values.

What you see in dcs as memory usage is sum of all resources used (combination of system ram, vram and page file on hdd/ssd even if/when vram and system ram gets full). Also it is either not 100% accurate, or dcs was messy with unloading resources after you quit the mission.

Where applicable, vram has priority and if your gpu has a lots of it, it will get used (esp. when combining extreme view distance and preload radiuses with high res textures and rendering resolution) - thus more vram is better, faster is better, higher memory bandwidth is better and so on.

Imo in almost 2018 there is no reason to buy a card with less than 6-8gb vram, even if you are at 1080p/1440p single screen.

Edit: I forgot to ask, OP do you run SLI? Or low speed ram by a chance?

What you see in dcs as memory usage is sum of all resources used (combination of system ram, vram and page file on hdd/ssd even if/when vram and system ram gets full). Also it is either not 100% accurate, or dcs was messy with unloading resources after you quit the mission.

 

Where applicable, vram has priority and if your gpu has a lots of it, it will get used (esp. when combining extreme view distance and preload radiuses with high res textures and rendering resolution) - thus more vram is better, faster is better, higher memory bandwidth is better and so on.

 

Imo in almost 2018 there is no reason to buy a card with less than 6-8gb vram, even if you are at 1080p/1440p single screen.

 

Edit: I forgot to ask, OP do you run SLI? Or low speed ram by a chance?

With MSI Afterburner, or HWinfo, you can read exactly each value and not a combination löike Spaghetti Carbonara mixmax ;)

With MSI Afterburner, or HWinfo, you can read exactly each value and not a combination löike Spaghetti Carbonara mixmax ;)

Yea bitmeister, I was mostly replying to a couple of above posts which mention in-game memory usage counter and what it does.

I use mostly gpushark in advanced mode, when in need for something lightweight to check usage/clocks/memorycontroller/etc of a gpu (or nvinspector or gpuZ) or just aida64 when I need the full system monitoring suite to go into finer details.