Anyone with 2GB VRAM+ get microstuttering in BF3 with 4x MSAA?

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WiL11o6

Limp Gawd
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Feb 20, 2007
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I have SLI GTX 570s 1.28GBs and during heavy firefights in 64-player maps, I get pretty bad stuttering at times, dropping down from 80-30fps for about 2 seconds and gets unplayable because it stays at 30fps and gets all jerky. I game at 1080p and when I'm on smaller maps, like team deathmatch games, I can run 4x MSAA no problem, it's only on large conquest, I need to turn 4x MSAA down to 2x to get rid of the stuttering.

I have no idea how much VRAM BF3 uses, but I know it eats up a lot. Anyone with 2GB+ cards experience what I'm experiencing? I am looking for 2GB 6970 SLIs or maybe even the 1.5GB GTX 580s. I run everything Ultra and low FXAA with HBAO. I know 570s are monsters, but I spent $700 on video cards and I can't even max out BF3 with fluid FPS, so I'm thinking what if I grabbed two 6970s instead.
 
I've checked my VRAM usage in BF3 a few times, with a 2gb 6950 it's generally inbetween 1800mb and 1900mb with 4xAA (1920x1080). After a hour or 2 of playing it's maxed entirely out, so I'd say that's where your studdering is coming from. Try 'high' textures instead of Ultra...sounds dumb but people say high looks just like ultra.
 
Thanks for the reply ziggo. You're saying you don't get any stuttering at all right? All Ultra and 4xAA during intense battles?
 
I can't say you will or won't, but in my experience it's always smooth (besides a slight FPS drop during intense combat). That being on Caspian with 64 players, tanks exploding and shots everywhere in the forest w/ water near by, goes from 60 ~ 70fps to 50ish ~ 60fps. 1920x1080, Ultra, AA/FSAA HABO etc is a bit heavy for a single 6950. My buddy has 6950 CFX, shader unlocked, and he said it's not common to drop under 100fps at the same settings (1920x1200) with no studdering. I can definitely say I do not get studder like textures being loaded into my card from RAM/HDD though. I came from a 4850 512mb CFX, at 1920x1080 the studder is definitely entirely different than 'lag' etc.
 
How does your buddy get over constant 100fps on CFX 6950 (6970)? That's near GTX580 SLI territory. I only get 80 avg FPS on my SLI GTX 570s how'd you manage to get 60-70? When I was running a single 570, my average was 40-50 in large conquest maps.

I guess my VRAM is holding me that far back eh?
 
I asked him to confirm the numbers just to make sure. Post patch recently I used to get about 15% more fps...after the patch my FPS dropped about 15%. Not entirely sure why but other people have noticed this too (thread on guru3d). Currently I seem to be in the 50 to 70 range with my single 6950. Can't really say much for your SLI, I'm not to familiar with that :(

My 6950 is at 1000/1350 if that matters, pretty high OC on the card.

Edit: He said he sees a low of 75 to 200fps. So with a low of 75fps, I can imagine the average is somewhere around 100, not to bad.
 
Thanks for the info, much appreciated.

Anyone else that have 2gb vram want to comment on your experience with Ultra and 4x MSAA?
 
I have a 570 with 1.2gb VRAM with the new beta drivers, can't say I have that problem. Prior to this I had a HD 6850 and had no issues. You might be better off with two hd 6970s in crossfire.
 
Are those classified GTX 570s from EVGA? If they are, did you make sure to get the update from EVGA? My brother's were stuttering as well, after he got that update(it helps regulate the fan and especially the voltages) he isn't getting stuttering anymore in his games.
 
yeah i would agree with others your probably running out of VRAM when this happens. i have experienced the same thing on my setup (2x 560 Ti 1gb's) if i even try to run AA in multiplayer. single player i can get away with 2x AA if i knock AO down to SBAO it keeps the game just under 1Gb but in multiplayer all bets are off. i ran high settings with no AA for a long time and never had any slow downs, average frame rates in the 80-90's even higher in smaller maps. on ultra settings but no AA and SBAO (yeah i have to drop that down too to keep under 1gb in multiplayer) my frame rates are still in the 70-80 range at least all the time.
 
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I'm on a 4.5ghz 2500k. It's just a bummer that the powerhouse 570Gtx is limited by vram and is the same price as 6970s.
 
WiL11o6 said:
I'm on a 4.5ghz 2500k. It's just a bummer that the powerhouse 570Gtx is limited by vram and is the same price as 6970s.
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yeah i wish i had 2Gb cards as well but meh i just care about high frame rates really and my setup delivers
 
It is vram. The only way to fix it is to turn off MSAA, lower the rest of your settings to high or even medium.

The main eaters of vram are MSAA, Mesh and HBAO, SSAO.

Either that or lower your resolution.

I play at 1600x1200, all low except for mesh on medium and SSAO is on. With a 480gtx soc and a 2500k at 4.4. I go around 90-180 fps. Even so, I still get stutters at times. I generally think it is server side b/c my vram use doesn't exceed 1.2gb and my 480 has 1.5gb.

Check this guide out. Explains a lot.

http://www./Optimize/Guides/battlefield-3-tweak-guide
 
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Thanks spaceman, the link doesn't work but I play at 2x MSAA now, at least in big 64-player maps. I do 4x MSAA elseware and I still get constant 80avg FPS all Ultra. The link doesn't work btw.
 
Just play BF3 on high, it looks just as good as ultra settings. No, really, try it and see if you can spot the difference.

MSAA is hardly effective in this game to start with and definitely not worth the hassle.
 
Btw, you guys need to understand wtf a vram limitation is first. When you are Vram limited, your drop to <5FPS. Dropping to 30FPS is not being Vram limited, and this whole "I need 214321434gb of Vram for 1920x1080" crap is horseshit. I don't know who started it, but they deserve to be smacked. So much garbage about Vram limiting people, its getting ridiculous.
 
xIronCrossx said:
Btw, you guys need to understand wtf a vram limitation is first. When you are Vram limited, your drop to <5FPS. Dropping to 30FPS is not being Vram limited, and this whole "I need 214321434gb of Vram for 1920x1080" crap is horseshit. I don't know who started it, but they deserve to be smacked. So much garbage about Vram limiting people, its getting ridiculous.
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Not necessarily. Going over the VRAM limit by a little bit won't completely tank your framerate.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4137/...-6950-1gb-xfxs-radeon-hd-6870-black-edition/5

See the Stalker COP 2560x1600 bench. The 2gb 6950 is about 15% faster than the 1gb version, which suggests that it is running into a VRAM limitation but note that the framerate isn't 5fps.
 
stuttering single ggtx 570 here think its my hard drives lol cause vram is liek 1260 max and it says card has 1280
 
xIronCrossx said:
Btw, you guys need to understand wtf a vram limitation is first. When you are Vram limited, your drop to <5FPS. Dropping to 30FPS is not being Vram limited, and this whole "I need 214321434gb of Vram for 1920x1080" crap is horseshit. I don't know who started it, but they deserve to be smacked. So much garbage about Vram limiting people, its getting ridiculous.
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baddog121390 said:
Not necessarily. Going over the VRAM limit by a little bit won't completely tank your framerate.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4137/...-6950-1gb-xfxs-radeon-hd-6870-black-edition/5

See the Stalker COP 2560x1600 bench. The 2gb 6950 is about 15% faster than the 1gb version, which suggests that it is running into a VRAM limitation but note that the framerate isn't 5fps.
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different game engines handle running out of VRAM differently. i can say without a doubt running out of VRAM in BF3 results in a massive performance hit that comes out of nowhere and stays there until you move to a scene that does not push your video card over its VRAM limit.

this is what running out of VRAM looks like in BF3

bf32011-11-1311-42-17-84.jpg


the left half of the graph are old frames that are past, the right is the newest frames produced. notice that is is the CPU and GPU both that is the source of the massive performance hit and this can be explained pretty easily with this game. it seems when it runs out of VRAM its falling back on using system RAM to fill in, this puts a normally unnecessarily high read write load on the CPU and causes the CPU pull its attention away from rendering frames and because this game relies on the CPU so much for physics calculations its devastating to performance when it happens. games that don't tax your CPU to the limit or even use all the cores and many do not leave lots of headroom for you to let your cpu do other things while playing a game.
 
XdVeLoPeX said:
stuttering single ggtx 570 here think its my hard drives lol cause vram is liek 1260 max and it says card has 1280
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your running out of vram. not all 1280mb is usable to games. for starters most games and this one for sure does not use your hard drive while your in a loaded level. the whole reason for the loading screen in games is to load the data needed for that level/map into your system's memory so it has a fast route to send the data needed to the video card while also having all the data needed for the CPU to do its job while your in game.
 
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Big debate going here, whether the stuttering is caused by vram or not. Yes, I can play on high, I can play on low too for higher fps, but I spent $700 on 570s to run games maxed out, not play on almost maxed out. I guess I should have done more research first to future proof myself. I am sure 1.28gb vram will be obsolete and I don't plan to upgrade anytime soon. Granted I can still max out games, I would like to be able to max AA as well.
 
WiL11o6 said:
Big debate going here, whether the stuttering is caused by vram or not. Yes, I can play on high, I can play on low too for higher fps, but I spent $700 on 570s to run games maxed out, not play on almost maxed out. I guess I should have done more research first to future proof myself. I am sure 1.28gb vram will be obsolete and I don't plan to upgrade anytime soon. Granted I can still max out games, I would like to be able to max AA as well.
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yeah its unfortunate, i ran into the same thing when i got my 2nd 560 Ti you would think because 2x 560 Ti's in most games will handily outperform a single 580 and even match 590's performance it would be able to handle BF3 maxed out but the problem is the game takes so much VRAM without AA if you want to run this one maxed out and never get massive slow downs when you run out of VRAM it needs 2gb of VRAM and with higher resolutions i could see it requiring even more at times.

heck i just ran out of VRAM on my rig while playing a 64 player multiplayer game on firestorm once when the wrong situation happened and i was hopping out of my tank to attempt to repair it while being attacked by an attack chopper, all the explosions etc. that happened in that moment sent my frame rate from 80-90 fps down to 30 in an instant. after i respawned all was well again. this was with my modified ultra setting i have been using for the past few days that has thus far kept me just under 1gb of VRAM just barely.
(ultra everything, no AA, no FXAA, no motion blur and AO set to SBAO at 1920 x 1024)

i really don't care that much because i just want high frame rates and my setup delivers but finding the max setting that i can for sure stay under my vram limit is a bit tricky hehe
 
Yeah, it's because I just finished this build about two weeks ago and I planned on making a monster computer so I don't need to upgrade for a long time. Guess that's out of the question because future games will use up a lot of VRAM, maybe something like Battlefield 4 or something will require at minimum 2GB of VRAM to even turn on AA.
 
Op but you still have only 1.2gb Vram. Sli or CF the Gpus are still being seen as two separate Gpus rather than one big rendering engine. Try and lower some of the settings.
 
Well we can also hope for the newer AA technologies to be embraced ASAP.
I mean the newer shader based AA technologies, in the form of SMAA:

http://www.iryoku.com/introducing-subpixel-morphological-antialiasing


Some of us have post it before, and we are following it as it seems quite great, although if you watch the hd vid you will notice that it isn't perfect yet, but dang does it already look sweet! (now if only we could get "somedude" to do an injector based on it...)
 
Prob is the game uses massive vram even without AA. So yeah. I would not buy any gpu nowadays without at least 2gb. I am waiting on the 3gb 580s to drop with the new cards coming out to replace my Galaxy 480gtx soc w/ 1.5gb. It barely runs bf3 acceptably at 1600x1200 at all low with mesh on high. I still can drop to the friggin 60s at times! That is insane at such low settings and resolution. I also can get frames as high as 180. Largest swing in fps I have ever seen in a game.
 
How come cards' VRAM that are in SLI or CFX aren't additive. I've read a lot that even if you have 2 gtx 570's your VRAM is not 1.28gb*2 it's still 1.28gb. How does that work? I thought having another card handle the extra VRAM load would increase your available VRAM not keep it the same.
 
Maverick1337 said:
How come cards' VRAM that are in SLI or CFX aren't additive. I've read a lot that even if you have 2 gtx 570's your VRAM is not 1.28gb*2 it's still 1.28gb. How does that work? I thought having another card handle the extra VRAM load would increase your available VRAM not keep it the same.
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Each card needs to have its own complete copy of the data in the vram. SLI/CF usually use alternate frame rendering, so the cards switch off rendering every other frame. If each of the cards only had half of the data in their vram you wouldn't be able to render the whole frame, or you'd have to transfer lots of data over the PCI-e bus which is very slow relative to how fast the cards can grab data out of their vram.

edit: At least I assume that's the reason. I actually don't know the real reason :p
 
Yes that is the reason as they can't really share pointers of memory like a "real" single gpu, so each gpu has it's own set of memory pointers and thus it's own set of memory data.

This may change with GCN as they are trying to do a real integrated memory solution able to even share pointers with the cpu (they haven't said that it could be used this way, but is a logic use if the feature works properly).
 
I can also add this: I have a GTX580 and when everything is on Ultra with Anti Deferred at 4x it comsumes almost all of my VRAM. When I put everything to High with Anti Deferred OFF, ANIS 16x, Ambient Off, Motion Blur Off, and Anti Post on High it only consumes 730 on the VRAM. I'll be honest, I really don't see a huge difference between the High settings and the Ultra settings.

My friend also has the SLI'd Evga GTX 570's and get's stutter and we have been trying to troubleshoot this for about a week. We have tried everything that Google has to offer and notta. Somebody earlier recommended the Evga Bios update... that is new and we'll give it a try. If he play's with just one card the stuttering goes away so it's obviously a SLI thing... which btw I hope it doesn't effect me since I have another GTX 580 on it's way:)
 
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baddog121390 said:
Each card needs to have its own complete copy of the data in the vram. SLI/CF usually use alternate frame rendering, so the cards switch off rendering every other frame. If each of the cards only had half of the data in their vram you wouldn't be able to render the whole frame, or you'd have to transfer lots of data over the PCI-e bus which is very slow relative to how fast the cards can grab data out of their vram.

edit: At least I assume that's the reason. I actually don't know the real reason :p
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What about the 590 or 6990 that tout 4gb and 3gb? Are they not really that amount but half per say?
 
WiL11o6 said:
I'm on a 4.5ghz 2500k. It's just a bummer that the powerhouse 570Gtx is limited by vram and is the same price as 6970s.
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AMD cards take a greater perfomance hit with MSAA is enabled, the [H] review pointed this out.
From my own experience, even with the smaller VRAM, gameplay was smoother and FPS was higher on the 570 than the 6950 when MSAA is enabled.
 
Maverick1337 said:
What about the 590 or 6990 that tout 4gb and 3gb? Are they not really that amount but half per say?
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Exactly half per gpu.

Again, current gpu's can't share memory pointers, but if GCN is able to deliver a memory controller that really let's it share pointers with the system then it wouldn't be too crazy for them to also share pointers between each other... gotta wait and see tho.
 
What program are you guys using to check VRAM useage in games on Nvidia cards?
 
6950/6970 have a problem i BF3 and 4xaa enabled. Big FPS impact and fps drops during explosions etc..

I play BF3 1080p with 4xaa and vram usage is over 1400mb.1480mb max. Same on the gtx 580 3gb and 1.5gb. Have them both..
 
MSI afterburner.

And roki, just the man I want to talk to. You say you get stuttering with your 2gb cards, that puts my mind at peace. Means that my 570s are still good enough and the problem isn't fully vram limited. Is ur 6950 2gb?
 
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