7970 using all vram

[KamikazeRedneck]

So the last couple times I have played BF3 my vram uses 3100mb (which I didn't know was possible...). I record this using afterburners latest beta. I have run unigine, 3d mark 11, vantage, all benchmark, crysis 3 and haven't had any issues with my vram being used more than 1500mb. I don't know why all the sudden in game it is doing this. Nothing changes from when I run a benchmark to BF3. Is this possibly a BF3 problem? I haven't read any problems with BF3 recently but that seems to be the common denominator here. any help would be great! By the way I have 2 monitors at 1080p but am only running 1 in game if that helps.

 

[airdeano]

welcome to the OC3D forums,

im not a gamer, but the map textures these have to include are beastly large.
watching TTL vids show the major titles usually max the memory outta these cards.
most driving games are CPU intensive, thus not much memory used.

as for the report of 3100 vs 3072 thats quirky, but not really uncommon as
some destop RAM sometimes reports higher capacity as well.

 

[KamikazeRedneck]

I should have specified completely but 3100 is the lowest I have been seeing. It has been going into the 3200's almost 3300 which is far out of the discrepancy range to me. Also I have noticed that my cpu has been running higher from around 40-50% up to 70-80% on all 8 cores and my ram is higher from 50% to 65-70%. I just want to make sure something didn't change with my computer in the last couple days because I have been benchmarking and running everything to the max

 

[Noz_God]

That don't seem right. My 680gtx only hits 1350mb on ultra preset

 

[KamikazeRedneck]

That don't seem right. My 680gtx only hits 1350mb on ultra preset

That's the problem...I shouldn't be this high but all of the sudden I am. I got my 2nd 7970 last week and had been playing fine until friday and yesterday and then I'm getting what is happening now. I have tried reloading the drivers and have upgraded to the latest afterburner beta and there is no change. It doesn't really effect my fps much but sometimes it just crashes or slows the fps down to 10-15fps which is very noticeable. I have noticed that my gpu's don't really use more than 60% in game at 80-100fps which I know is probably normal because I only have a 60hz monitor and anything more is just not necessary but I would doubt that any of those variables would be effecting my cpu load or vram but anything is possible I guess

 

[Noz_God]

so that is the vram usage over the 2 cards or on each card?

 

[KamikazeRedneck]

so that is the vram usage over the 2 cards or on each card?

The vram only gets used from 1 card in crossfire so even though I have 2 cards with 3gig each totaling 6gigs, I can only use 3gigs of it. I know it sounds weird but that is just how it works in crossfire

 

[Jojimbo]

The vram only gets used from 1 card in crossfire so even though I have 2 cards with 3gig each totaling 6gigs, I can only use 3gigs of it. I know it sounds weird but that is just how it works in crossfire

Reported vRAM doubles when playing with CF enabled, that's why it's can go over 3GB

 

[Noz_God]

No it use's the same amount on each card. so if its 3200 over both cards that seems normal. What are u using to read card usage

 

[KamikazeRedneck]

Ok so I am using afterburner to tell me what my vram is and it states that card 1 uses the memory and not card 2. But if what you say is true about it possibly using memory from both cards then why is my game crashing because of not enough vram or lowering fps so much when the vram goes up?

 

[alienware]

The vram only gets used from 1 card in crossfire so even though I have 2 cards with 3gig each totaling 6gigs, I can only use 3gigs of it. I know it sounds weird but that is just how it works in crossfire

Hmm I thought both cards had to store the same textures given they rendered alternate frames?

Any way I'm not certain on that bit..

What I do know is that when running BF3 I saw more vram usage on a Radeon 6970 2gb than I did on a GTX 480. I'm pretty sure that Nvidia also uses system ram as I apparently (according to the message in big red letters) ran out of system ram when I applied 8xmsaa to NFS : Shift (had 4gb at the time).

But yeah, I used to see 1.2gb usage on my GTX 480 and 1.5gb on my 6970 2gb.

 

[KamikazeRedneck]

Up until Friday I was only using 1500mb of vram so that's why I'm asking about the sudden change. Plus the fact the the fps gets low, game crashes and the cpu is being used a lot more it tells me that either the monitor that I used has started to malfunction or something isn't working right. I appreciate all the help in trying to figure this out!

 

[Noz_God]

Could be an afterburner fault, try not using afterburner and see how it go's. other than that it looks like a driver fault. It should show the same amount of vram being used on both cards that's how my sli setup was shown in afterburner.

 

[alienware]

Up until Friday I was only using 1500mb of vram so that's why I'm asking about the sudden change. Plus the fact the the fps gets low, game crashes and the cpu is being used a lot more it tells me that either the monitor that I used has started to malfunction or something isn't working right. I appreciate all the help in trying to figure this out!

Sounds like a bug in the game code to me, or could possibly be a driver change?