Shadow of Mordor peaks within percentile points of the available bandwidth on a 770 (224GB/s), but all other games remain below to 200GB/s mark. Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor was my choice for the AAA genre to slaughter my VRAM and hopefully put my GPU memory controller and VRAM to the test. Far Cry 4 felt like a good representative for the AAA genre that has balance in both general performance of the CPU, GPU, and moderate VRAM requirements.
I’ve chosen two other games for the AAA area, one very generalised game, and one that boasted massive 4GB VRAM requirements for general high res play. This game has massive VRAM requirements, and is quite a GPU heavy game. To represent the independent games, while also holding a high VRAM requirement, I’ve run with Starpoint Gemini II. It has a reasonable VRAM requirement, but is overall quite light on general GPU usage, so it should stress the memory somewhat. This is Source engine based, highly CPU intensive, and should cover most games running that sort of requirement. For CPU orientated, I’ve run with Insurgency. I’ve chosen to run with 4 games which I felt represented a fair array of game types. The only graphical alteration to my video settings was turning off VSync and Motion Blur. Every preset is set to High where Very High is unavailable. All loads are different.Īll of the following benchmarks were run 4 times for each game on each resolution for accuracy. NVidia has said themselves that Bus usage is wholly inaccurate, and most of us are aware that Memory Controller Load (%) cannot represent the exact bandwidth usage (GB/s) with total precision. They have been estimated and extrapolated using performance percentages of the benchmark figures I’ve got, as such, most of this article will be relying largely on those estimations. Something I need to make clear before you read on, my memory bandwidth usage figures (GB/s) are not 100% accurate. I had a fair few expectations from the figures, but the results I got were a little less than expected. AMD has yet to allow such a measurement, and thanks to for throwing me a test build of GPU-Z, I could run some Bus usage benchmarks. Something else that only NVidia cards allow measurements of is PCIe Bus usage. Another example would be GPU Load, wherein various types of load can cause the same percentage figure measurement, but can have very different power usage readings, leading us to assume one 97% load can be much more intensive than another. The easiest way to explain it is it acts similar to the percentage CPU utilisation Task Manager shows. This is a percentage figure does not accurately measure the total GB/s bandwidth that is being used. Typically using GPU-Z, what we have available to us is “Memory Controller Load”. Memory bandwidth usage is actually incredibly difficult to measure, but it’s the only way of making known once and for all, what the real 1080p requirement is for memory bandwidth. This card is primarily aimed at the midrange crowd, wanting to run modern titles (both AAA and independent), at a native resolution of 1080p. The GPU offers a 112GB/s memory bandwidth, and many believe that this narrow interface will not provide enough memory bandwidth for games. The main reason for running into this kind of article was with the recent “exclamations” about the GTX 960’s 128bit wide memory interface.
Holy crap I am tired and this is all probably totally wrong