Can a GTX 960 utilize 4GB of VRAM?

[STIHL]

I have heard the GTX 960 cannot use the whole 4GB VRAM because of the memory bandwidth or something? Is this true because soon i will be upgrading GPU to whatever is cheaper, a GTX 960 and a R9 380, both of which in the 4GB model. So can the GTX 960 use the whole 4GB or not?

 

[rolli59]

It can but very rare that it needs to.

 

[geofelt]

VRAM has become a marketing issue.
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.
Vram is managed by the Graphics card driver, and by the game. There may be differences in effectiveness between amd and nvidia cards.
And differences between games.
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.
And... no game maker wants to limit their market by
requiring huge amounts of vram. The vram you see will be appropriate to the particular card.

 

[PsyKhiqZero]

Yep, not many games will use it at 1080p. According to the video I saw only assasins creed really benefits from the extra vram.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX_mW36BDKs

 

[rolli59]

Yep, not many games will use it at 1080p. According to the video I saw only assasins creed really benefits from the extra vram.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX_mW36BDKs

And higher resolutions the card is not powerful enough unless you do 2 x in SLI and then the 4GB is big benefit.

 

[Fingernail]

I just ran a test with a gtx 670 sc 4gb.
Playing Insurgency with 3 monitors and max settings it used only 33 percent of it's Vram (about 1.3 gigs).
then I loaded Call of duty advanced warfare and selected max settings (2x aa because anything else kills the game).
With 4gb ram installed you can now select the cache sun maps option as well as pre-load shaders etc.
after running the game on 1 screen, the memory utilized was 99 percent. (@55 fps)
Not sure how many new titles will support options like these but even if the GPU power is not enough to run 4gb;
It still can be used in different ways.
Thought this info might be useful.

 

[geofelt]

How did you measure how much vram was utilized?
99%, I think simply says that there was content in all of the ram.
But, it does not necessarily mean that all of it was being actively utilized.
To truly see how much vram is needed for good performance, one would need to be able to remove some vram and conduct performance tests to see the impact.
Graphics card designers can do this, we users can't.
That is why Nvidia designers came up with the two level vram scheme on the GTX970.
They apparently found that a second level of slower vram did not impact performance and the cost trade off made the GTX970 more affordable.
Too bad they did not explain this to the marketing people.