MSI Introduces its GeForce GTX 770 4 GB Graphics Card

[OcelotRex]

It's an incremental step in the right direction. That being said, being able to load large texture packs would be useful. As for having no benefit to the extra memory, well, that gets said every two or so years. Then a game pulls a GTA IV and starts gobbling up the VRAM. Fidelity increases are not necessarily keyed to polygon count or overall scene complexity. Tech luddites are always griping that we can't make use of this, that no, extra of that is pointless. Ignore it and go on.

I had a friend who griped that around the time of GTA IV saying that quad core CPUs were useless due to blah blah blah threading and bandwidth. I could play the game. He couldn't.

Those are really good points. I'm not super technical with gaming; I prefer to read the experts and formulate my own opinion. That being said the next generation of consoles going for that 60 FPS target is a good thing. So is large texture packs to go along with the possible 3-5 GB of RAM for the GPU. From the article I posted though it looks likes these targets are going to be achieved in the same manner as the current gen - by sacrificing AA or some trickery, read "optimization." That will leave the PC gamers in the same position they've always been in with superior control over their games content and graphics quality.

The one "ace up the sleeve" may in fact be the XBox One that everyone was complaining about. With their cloud infrastructure to support the platform developers may be able to offload certain workflows into the "cloud" and keep up for longer with PC's. Unless something drastically changes with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia CPU components today should be on par if not better than what will be coming out for consoles this holiday season. As the article I posted stated, the demo was shown on one GTX 680 whereas the console version lacked all the effects. Who knows what kind of cards will be around in 7-10 years when they are retiring the PS4 and XB One.

 

[laststop311]

useless unless you have a triple monitor setup. for all these people saying future proofing for the games coming out in the next few years you will probably want a 20nm GPU by then as they will have moved down from 28nm GPU manufactures have extracted all thr performance they can from 28nm they can only increase performance by increasing die area. So buying to future proof is stupid the 20nm gpu's are going to be a big boost in performance and you will end up wanting that and replacing the card anyways. Ram prices will probably be cheaper too so the increase in price for the larger ram card may be smaller then too. Always purchase for you immediate needs that way you can stay with the best price to performance ratio. By the time you need something better that something better will have come down in price allowing you to stay current at the cheapest possible prices.

 

[nord_musician]

4GB VRAM useless? Maybe for gaming but I use the extra VRAM for CUDA applications, not gaming. Not everybody can afford a Tesla or Quadro card

 

[JackNaylorPE]

You stopped on the Hexus.net article right before it explained this:

"This graph shows that while the average and per-second framerate of the EVGA card is better than the 6GB-equipped Sapphire TOXIC, both produce a near-identical number of sub-33ms frames. Of more interest is the 2,204MB framebuffer usage when running the EVGA card, suggesting that the game, set to Ultra quality, is stifled by the standard GTX 680's 2GB. We ran the game on both GTX 680s directly after one another and didn't feel the extra smoothness implied by the results of the 4GB-totin' card."

It explained that he didn't "see" a difference in a particular game on a particular screen. The 4k screens are just arriving and game manufacturers are just now beginning to design games to the hardware available.

 

[OcelotRex]

You stopped on the Hexus.net article right before it explained this:

"This graph shows that while the average and per-second framerate of the EVGA card is better than the 6GB-equipped Sapphire TOXIC, both produce a near-identical number of sub-33ms frames. Of more interest is the 2,204MB framebuffer usage when running the EVGA card, suggesting that the game, set to Ultra quality, is stifled by the standard GTX 680's 2GB. We ran the game on both GTX 680s directly after one another and didn't feel the extra smoothness implied by the results of the 4GB-totin' card."

It explained that he didn't "see" a difference in a particular game on a particular screen. The 4k screens are just arriving and game manufacturers are just now beginning to design games to the hardware available.

To bring this back to the console portion of the discussion -

The PS4 camp has been definitive on 4k gaming; it will not support it.

The Xbox One has less raw power than the ps4 on the console and some tech writers have speculated that Microsoft has been elusive in confirming no 4k gaming because it might be possible with their cloud servers.

Either way we're years (3-5?) away from 4k being common in the living room. In that time frame the extra money spent on cards with a 256-bit memory bus end up being wasteful except in very small instances. The money doesn't justify the small performance increases and can be spent in other areas for more performance gains.

 

[ThermalV]

The memory bus width is the same as the 2G version, you probably won't ever see any performance improvement :L

 

[ThermalV]

The memory bus width is the same as the 2G version, you probably won't ever see any performance improvement :L

 

[10tacle]

[/quotemsg]

The PS4 camp has been definitive on 4k gaming; it will not support it.

Either way we're years (3-5?) away from 4k being common in the living room. In that time frame the extra money spent on cards with a 256-bit memory bus end up being wasteful except in very small instances. The money doesn't justify the small performance increases and can be spent in other areas for more performance gains. [/quotemsg]

Bear in mind developers need to core code the game for 4K resolution. So it's not just the TV to consider. The PS3 was launched Holiday 2006. It wasn't until 2009-2010 that a number of the new games introduced were actually coded for 1080p from the ground up (my first was Gran Tourismo 5). Keep in mind there's a difference between native coded 1080p and a game that will play at 1080p up-scaled from native 720p. A lot of people have a misconception on that.

So point being, even if the PS4 could/will support 4K with a firmware upgrade or something, doesn't mean we'll be seeing games at 4K native resolution any time soon.

 

[OcelotRex]

The PS4 camp has been definitive on 4k gaming; it will not support it.

Either way we're years (3-5?) away from 4k being common in the living room. In that time frame the extra money spent on cards with a 256-bit memory bus end up being wasteful except in very small instances. The money doesn't justify the small performance increases and can be spent in other areas for more performance gains.

Bear in mind developers need to core code the game for 4K resolution. So it's not just the TV to consider. The PS3 was launched Holiday 2006. It wasn't until 2009-2010 that a number of the new games introduced were actually coded for 1080p from the ground up (my first was Gran Tourismo 5). Keep in mind there's a difference between native coded 1080p and a game that will play at 1080p up-scaled from native 720p. A lot of people have a misconception on that.

So point being, even if the PS4 could/will support 4K with a firmware upgrade or something, doesn't mean we'll be seeing games at 4K native resolution any time soon.

Reading up a little on the matter it confirms what you are saying the most current gen are 720p upscaled to 1080p. It also goes to prove my point in the discussion the further amounts of VRAM in cards today don't justify the extra money for higher resolutions.

My thoughts are to buy for today and spend money on valuable parts. The 4GB on the card does not offer value. If money is no option buy it knowing that extra $40-50 could be spent elsewhere with better performance gains.

 

[twanto]

Despite all the hoopla about 4gb being overkill even at higher resolution for current games, I'm not quite convinced. First, take into account Skyrim w/ texture mods and Shogun 2. Both of these games are reported to use large swaths of vram over 2gb. The Hexus review cited did not test Skyrim. It tested Shogun 2, but it did not seem to account for the fact that the game will downscale your settings when it runs out of vram. This could be the reason for the 4gb and 2gb 680's in their test running similarly in their 3x monitor setup, hence their reporting of the game using less than 2gb of vram. http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/17730-Holy-VRAM-****

 

[all stalked out]

I game at 1920 x1080 at the moment and using high res textures I often get a ram usage of up to 2.3 or 2.4 gb's. For that reason 2gb's isn't enough so I bought the 4gb MSI 770 above, Incidentally as well as higher clocks out of the box than the MSI 2gb gaming model it also comes with a nice backplate. I never kept it long even though I found it to be a really nice well built card that performed well.

 

[all stalked out]

I game at 1920 x1080 at the moment and using high res textures I often get a ram usage of up to 2.3 or 2.4 gb's. For that reason 2gb's isn't enough so I bought the 4gb MSI 770 above, Incidentally as well as higher clocks out of the box than the MSI 2gb gaming model it also comes with a nice backplate. I never kept it long even though I found it to be a really nice well built card that performed well.