How much Vram do you need to run Skyrim + Mods

[CorrupT88]

I am thinking of getting a small upgrade of either an ati 6970 or a GTX 570....

Mainly because I want a cheap upgrade <£50 which has more Vram as I have noticed quite a few games my 5870 1Gb is not enough anymore...

I was just wondering how much ram you need to run the following games with all texture mods, ultra high textures etc. With AA/AF at 1080p....

Battlefield 3
Skyrim + ultra 2k HD textures etc.
Crysis 2 Ultra textures...

Any other recent games...

I am thinking that the GTX 570 with 1.3gb might not be enough? Although it is slightly better than the 6970 I think I might be better off as it has 2Gb Vram or will the 570 be sufficient? Thx

[icemanchilled]

You're going to need at least 2GB for Skyrim modded out, i'm running Skyrim maxed and tweaked out with loads of texture mods, 2xAA @1920, and i've seen memory usage hit almost around 1980MB.

[CorrupT88]

Ouch... Looks like I will have to go for the slightly slower card with the higher Vram then...

From what I have seen it doesn't look like 1.3Gb on the 570 will be enough for BF3 or Skyrim.

[dayglo98]

Wow I just checked Skyrim, I hit 3057Mb of video mem and although I was simultaneously fighting a dragon, a giant troll, giants and mammoths it was smooth all the while, on my 2gb 7850

[CorrupT88]

Maybe it just allocates it incase its needed but doesnt use it. Hope that made sense lol.

[Flare]

Find reviews that benchmark GTX 570 vs HD 6970 or HD 7850 to see which card has higher fps at the resolution you want to play at the settings you want to play.

FPS is the most objective and the most accurate predictions of how the card perform despite how many GB of Vram the card has. Why? The card may have 2 GB Vram or 3 GB Vram but if it has lower fps then whats the point? A lot of people try to justify their higher price tag because the card has X amount of Vram but in reality it doesn't use all of it. Even if GPU-Z indicate how much VRam is being allocated when playing a game doesn't mean that much Vram is actually being used. Games do allocate a lot more Vram than it can use.

[CorrupT88]

I have noticed recently that even although my 5870 runs most games at reasonable FPS it keeps running into problems due to low Vram. Clearly 1Gb is no longer enough ram for the big textures.... You can have a card that runs game at 500 million FPS but if it runs out of memory and stutters then it is unplayable....

I don't usually buy into the gimmicky cards with really big amounts of ram but it seems that in 2012 games are getting a lot more Vram hungry then they were 2-3 years ago.. Especially when installing mods and texture packs.