Exceeding VRAM.

[Zydrate]

I've begun trying to save up for a new graphics card that will allow me to run current games better than I can handle. Back when my graphics card fried, my local computer place replaced my card with a 1050 (Upgraded from a 960 at the time) but apparently it only had 2 GB's of VRAM. Well, that's not great for current generation games. A lot of recent Ubisoft games have an ingame VRAM tracker and I have to run the likes of Far Cry 5, AC:Origins, and Ghost Recon Wildlands on low to medium settings or I exceed the VRAM.

My question is, what will happen if I exceed their ingame counters even just by a couple hundred MB's? Like I want to activate VSync on Origins to avoid that horrible screen-tearing I keep getting but that makes it go up to like 2248 out of the 2000 I have available.

I'm told it might overheat my computer and shut down and quite frankly, I don't really want to fry yet another graphics card. On the other... I'm trying to record for my youtube and all these new games kind of look like shit.

I plan on upgrading but it'll take a few weeks to save up. In the meantime... Can I exceed VRAM?

 

[Arnoxthe1]

Well... No. You can't put data onto VRAM that's not there. Do you mean offloading the excess data to the RAM instead or something?

 

[Arina Love]

Back up for VRAM is system memory, ie RAM. Yes, you CAN exceed your VRAM but you will get stutters, so I wouldn't recommend exceeding it. It gets bad when my card uses that gimped 0.5 gb (of 4GB) of VRAM my GTX 970 has, so imagine when RAM get involved. But you can always try and see for yourself, MAYBE that 248mb of additional ram will not create bad stutters.

It will NOT overheat your PC or cause unexpected shutdowns. It's completely SAFE.

P.S. Try lowering your resolution to 1600x900 (900p) to free up some vRAM. It's not ideal but most of the graphically intensive games on PS4, Xbox One actually run at 900p, so it will look ok'ish.

 

[munx13]

Yes you can.
Nothing bad will happen, but the game might run slower because it would have to use the main system RAM or start swapping new data from and to the cards memory.
As a 2GB 960 owner myself I can say I haven't run into any major slowdowns and whenever I did, lowering the texture quality fixed it.

P.S. Try lowering your resolution to 1600x900 (900p) to free up some vRAM. It's not ideal but most of the graphically intensive games on PS4, Xbox One actually run at 900p, so it will look ok'ish.

IMO it's better to just lower the texture quality by 1 tier than to run a game in non-native resolution.

 

[Zydrate]

Yea Origins is on mediums but mostly low's I believe. Far Cry 5 is on low EVERTHING and still looks mostly fine.

I tried all the tricks but I'm still getting that annoying screen tear on Origins. Vsync usually fixes it but it didn't seem to here when I lowered the resolution. It was playable but very, very odd looking considering I'm at max res.

 

[fix-the-spade]

My question is, what will happen if I exceed their ingame counters even just by a couple hundred MB's? Like I want to activate VSync on Origins to avoid that horrible screen-tearing I keep getting but that makes it go up to like 2248 out of the 2000 I have available.

Technically you can't exceed the VRAM of your graphics card. It might start trying to use system RAM to cover the deficit, but that's not a common strategy on modern games.

What will happen when you place too high a demand on the GPU's memory is the game/program demanding it will either crash to desktop or run extremely slowly as the GPU won't be able to process frames quickly enough.

Overheating is unlikely to be a problem with a modern GPU, all 10 series (and 9, 7, 6 and 5) Nvidia GPUs have the ability to thermal throttle, they will run more slowly and draw less power if the temperature goes over a set threshold. It will make your computer even slower but it's not damaging to the system.

Dropping the resolution to 900p and disabling Anti Aliasing completely will cut the use of VRAM a lot. If you can hold on for a few months the price of a new GPU is going to be dropping. Nvidia are expected to be releasing 11-series cards soon and the viability of GPUs for coin mining has fallen rather dramatically since last year, so demand for GPUs is slowly starting to drop.

 

[junky66]

I don't understand why people here say you can't exceed.

Yes, it will use the system RAM. And when the RAM is over, it will use the storage. Ofcourse there are penalties in some cases, but many times the VRAM in use isn't that important for the current gaming (many stuff is loaded for non gaming scenes use)