a interesting question about vram

[colonelblake]

this is a time when vram is getting to be very important. witcher3, gta5, and even stalker mods are pushing the boundries of 1gb gpu's. heck, even at gpu pushing moments in battlefield 4 my 1gb 650ti ran out. this came on fast. and in the world of game development 1-2 years is fast.
do you think there willl ever be technology that can utilize your motherboard ram as vram? why not? makes sense. i feel that game developers are pushing us to buy more expensive gpu's. i read the witcher 3 "requires" a gtx660......jeez.....your thoughts

 

[Suzuki@1473780084@1473780163]

VRAM is much faster than DRAM. If you don't have enough VRAM you will see black textures, this is pretty rare today though. Upcoming games have pretty high requirements yeah!

 

[colonelblake]

but what about the technology of the apu? where it uses the "ram" of the cpu and delivers it to the gpu?

 

[geofelt]

My understanding is that vram is more of a performance issue than a functional issue.
A game needs to have most of the data in vram that it uses most of the time.
Somewhat like real ram.
If a game needs something not in vram, it needs to get it across the pcie boundary hopefully from real ram and hopefully not from a hard drive.
It is not informative to know to what level the available vram is filled.
Possibly much of what is there is not needed.
What is not known is the rate of vram exchange.
Here is an older performance test comparing 2gb with 4gb vram.
http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Video-Card-Performance-2GB-vs-4GB-Memory-154/
Spoiler... not a significant difference.