Does lower VGA ram size causes lag?

Hornet

Hornet

Supreme [H]ardness
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Oct 4, 2005
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I just got a GF6800 that comes with 128MB or RAM only
I notice that in heavy graphic games like FarCry and CS Source, the speed is ok but its not smooth, oftent there's this split second pause....

I don't experiece this problem with my old 9600Pro with 256MB ram, though of course the quality setting with that card was lower.

My system is running on a P4 2.8GHz, with 1GIG of system RAM, so i believe the system ram should be enough and is not the cause of that lag...

i was wondering, could it be due to low VGA ram? or my new card has some issues

thanks for any advise
 
The 6800 is a great card for those games. The ram will make a difference if your iq settings are maxed out. If not maxed out then you shouldn't get that hiccup your talking about. Make sure you got farcry patched to 1.3. Also make sure your power cable that goes into the card is dedicated and connected to the card only. You dont want anything to steal power from the card. Lastly make sure your power supply has about 18A on the +12v rail and is about 350watts or better.
 
Lower RAM does cause intermittent pauses in newer games (this is what you appear to be experiencing) because your PC can't load all the textures in the current level to video RAM and so must fetch some from system RAM on occasion. Each time it must do so the game will have hitch for half a second or so.

The solution is simply to turn down your texture detail settings so the textures themselves are compressed, and thus smaller. Doing so will hopefully allow you to load them all onto the videocard, thus resolving the issue causing pauses.

This is actually the same issue that you would have trying to run Doom3 in Ultra-High Quality mode on a 256MB card. Pauses when you open doors too some rooms because the videocard has to swap a few textures in from system RAM to display the new area.
 
Well it also depends what resolution your trying to okay at and how much AA ur using, but unless both are set very high ur video card ram shouldnt be to much of a bottleneck.
 
Generally you don't want to use highest quality textures on 128mb of VGA RAM anymore. Most games don't tell you how much VGA ram you should have per setting unfortunately(Doom3 does I believe).
 
Lag is strictly a connectivity issue.


Are you speaking of low fps, stuttering or what? A 128 videocard is not enough these days and 1GB on system memory will soon be cutting it close.
 
Actually stuttering is caused by pulling textures from the hard disk / page file. Adding more system memory solves the problem. Pulling data from system memory wouldn't cause such a pronounced jerkiness like we see in BF2 and F.E.A.R at max texture settings.
 
Hornet said:
I just got a GF6800 that comes with 128MB or RAM only
I notice that in heavy graphic games like FarCry and CS Source, the speed is ok but its not smooth, oftent there's this split second pause....

I don't experiece this problem with my old 9600Pro with 256MB ram, though of course the quality setting with that card was lower.

My system is running on a P4 2.8GHz, with 1GIG of system RAM, so i believe the system ram should be enough and is not the cause of that lag...

i was wondering, could it be due to low VGA ram? or my new card has some issues

thanks for any advise
Click to expand...

No..... my 6600GT can run CS source pretty good with no hiccups.
 
Devnull,
its sort of a split second pause from time to time, FPS is pretty fast, around 40 to 60FPS in farcry

delusion_2005,
by right, yeah CSS should be too stressful on the card. in fact the game suggested a 4xAA, but i turn it down to 2AA, but it still have that problem.

trinibwoy said:
Actually stuttering is caused by pulling textures from the hard disk / page file. Adding more system memory solves the problem. Pulling data from system memory wouldn't cause such a pronounced jerkiness like we see in BF2 and F.E.A.R at max texture settings.
Click to expand...
Thats what i thought too at first, but when I use alt+cltr+del to check total memory shows to be around 600-800MB at any time...so i feel the 1GIG should be enough....I havent tried FEAR though, but the problem is happening with farcry which only use about 800MB total memory

I'm just affraid if theres any hardware problem :(
 
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