#4k civilization beyond earth background Pc

So the current PC situation pushes VRAM requirements higher still.

#4k civilization beyond earth background windows

The Windows Desktop Window Manager responsible for rendering and compositing the different windows together in 3D space consumes its own VRAM as well.

#4k civilization beyond earth background 1080p

PC gamers buying high-end cards like the R9 Fury X will be running at resolutions greater than 1080p and likely with higher quality settings than the console equivalent, driving up the VRAM requirements.

Throwing an extra wrench into things is that PCs have more going on than just console games. Still, when using the current-gen consoles as a baseline, the current situation makes it possible to build a game that requires over 4GB of VRAM (if only just over), and if that game is naïvely ported over to the PC, there could be issues. To be fair to AMD and to be technically correct these are shared memory devices, so that 8GB gets split between GPU resources and CPU resources, and even this comes after Microsoft and Sony set aside a significant amount of memory for their OSes and background tasks. Perhaps the single biggest influence here over VRAM requirements right now is the current-generation consoles, which launched back in 2013 with 8GB of RAM each. Now however they are on the other foot, and the timing is not all that great. Thanks in large part to their favoring wider memory buses (which means more memory chips), AMD has offered greater memory capacities at similar prices than traditionally stingy NVIDIA. This is quite a bit of a role reversal in the video card industry, as traditionally AMD has offered more VRAM than the competition. Even ignoring NVIDIA for a moment, R9 Fury X offers less VRAM than AMD’s next-lower tier of video cards. But it’s also less VRAM than the 6GB that is on the GTX 980 Ti in 2015 (never mind the GTX Titan X at this point) and it’s less VRAM than the 8GB that is on the just-launched R9 390X. 4GB is as much VRAM as was on the R9 290X in 2013, it’s as much VRAM as was on the GTX 980 in 2014. To address the elephant in the room then, the question arises of whether 4GB is going to be enough VRAM. Ultimately for reasons ranging from interposers to where to place the stacks, the most AMD can get out of HBM1 is 4GB of VRAM. Larger stacks are not possible, and while in principle it would be possible to do an 8 stack HBM1 design, doing so would double the width of the memory bus and invite a whole slew of issues with it at the same time. With a 1GB/stack limit, this means that AMD can only equip the R9 Fury X and its siblings with 4GB of VRAM when using 4 stacks. Having taken a look at HBM from a technical perspective, there’s one final matter to address with Fiji’s implementation of HBM, and that is the matter of capacity.įor HBM1, the maximum capacity of a HBM stack is 1GB, which in turn is made possible through the use of 4 256MB (2Gb) memory dies.