Can Skyrim utalize 6gb of Vram?

[ropesend]

I'm currently looking to get a new video card, I want to be able to drive at least 3 1920x1200 monitors and have a lot of visual mods installed. (I'm aware of some of the multi-monitor problems with skyrim) I'm leaning towards 2 4gb 680 in SLI probably EVGA but I'm also considering The Saphire Toxic 7970 which has 6gb of vram. Basically I want to know if the 4gb limit also applies to vram or is the game can utilize 6gb. I'm not worried about money, I just want the best possible results. Thanks in advance for any advise.

[Georgiegril]

I am by no means an expert, but there very few, if any, games that could currently make use of 6 gb VRAM. That being said, looking at how these thing go, in a couple of years 6 GB may well be the minimum spec.

My theory is that it is always best to buy the most advance technology you can afford, since it will be obsolete just a bit later....

Also, I am a big fan of EVGA, I've found them to have excellent support!

[ropesend]

I am by no means an expert, but there very few, if any, games that could currently make use of 6 gb VRAM. That being said, looking at how these thing go, in a couple of years 6 GB may well be the minimum spec.

My theory is that it is always best to buy the most advance technology you can afford, since it will be obsolete just a bit later....

Also, I am a big fan of EVGA, I've found them to have excellent support!

Thank you for your advise, And I appreciate the comment on EVGA, I am leaning strongly in that direction. but I know for sure that the game can utilize all 3GB of my existing card when I monitor it on MSI Afterburner it is consistently at or very close to the 3GB mark. I admit that I don't know that it "NEEDS" the 3GB I just know it uses it all. I'd like to know if there is a hard limit to what the game can utilize, like there is with system ram.

[Georgiegril]

Well, I don't have your answer there, except that as far as I know, 6 GB is beyond the needs of current games. And that will probably change.

Edit. I got curious. Not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for, but it is from the Microsoft Website, about Windows limits on VRAM devices.

 

 

How graphics cards and other devices affect memory limits

 

Devices have to map their memory below 4 GB for compatibility with non-PAE-aware Windows releases. Therefore,

if the system has 4GB of RAM, some of it is either disabled or is remapped above 4GB by the BIOS. If the memory

is remapped, X64 Windows can use this memory. X86 client versions of Windows don't support physical memory above

the 4GB mark, so they can't access these remapped regions. Any X64 Windows or X86 Server release can.

 

 

X86 client versions with PAE enabled do have a usable 37-bit (128 GB) physical address space. The limit that

these versions impose is the highest permitted physical RAM address, not the size of the IO space. That means

PAE-aware drivers can actually use physical space above 4 GB if they want. For example, drivers could map the

"lost" memory regions located above 4 GB and expose this memory as a RAM disk.

 

 

 

 

 

[acidzebra]

I'd like to know if there is a hard limit to what the game can utilize, like there is with system ram

 

I don't think so, it's just data sitting there. It's not a 32-bit program running (which is the source of the limitation for the game itself), it's a bunch of data (geometry, textures) loaded by your graphics card/CPU into VRAM because the game asked it to and it agreed it had the capacity. More vram = more data being stored for quick access when requested to render. The game itself doesn't care about what the actual textures or meshes are, it just knows that in this location, those objects should be rendered and they're called X and located in path C:\xxx so it passes on the request.

 

"load these and these textures and this and that mesh and render such and such targets"

"hokay!"

Edited December 1, 2012 by acidzebra