I hit the 3.5 gb vram limit on the Gtx 970. Should I upgrade to the Gtx 980 for 4gb of vram?

[saucemagic]

I recently noticed I hit the vram limit on my gtx 970, that I bought before the news broke that it only has 3.5 gb (fuck you nividia). I hit the limit in jk's markarth where i noticed alot of stutters. The stuttering only happens in city's, probably due to the amount of texture mods I am running and the jk series of city mods. Would the additional 500 mb and faster vram speeds really make a diffrence or is it simply a matter of scaling back my texutre mods or uninstalling the jk city mods? Is my vram usage abnormally high when compared to other peoples games? I am asking this because I heard that newegg is allowing people to return their cards for a full refund. So it would only be about $170 for me to upgrade...

[ousnius]

I got the MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G before the 970's limitation was reveiled. I'm not sure if it's truly a problem of the VRAM that you're experiencing.

 

In any case, the 970 does indeed have the full 4 GB of VRAM, it's just that the last 500 MB of them are slower. It only having 3.5 GB isn't true at all (though the other problem is just as annoying). There have been benchmarks that reveiled that the problem only makes the FPS drop by 2 or so when reaching the addition 500 MB and doesn't make it a full-on stutter-orgy.

 

So... not sure what to tell you. Depends on if you want to spend the extra $ I suppose. Personally it was worth it for me.

[lordgdavid]

I have a 970 myself and would do that only if I was stuffed with money.

[Vacaliga]

Well since you said it only happens in cities i have my doubt that your vram is the main problem, even if you are going near the limit, markarth (and other cities) have a lot of stuff going on besides just having a buttload of textures, like NPC's sandboxing around, waterfalls, water mills, scripted events etc.

 

Going from a 970 to a 980 sure you'll have a better faster card but i'm willing to bet that you will not see a huge performance increase across the board. 

 

I also have 970 (OC'ed as high as i could get it) in my gaming rig upgrading from an old 470, and i didn't see a huge performance boost in skyrim in relations to cities, basically all it did was allowing me to run more taxing ENB's

 

However if you wanna cut some corners and ease up your textures load a bit, ask yourself do I really need this texture to be 4k or will 2k/1k be fine? personally i try to stay away from that infamous 4K tag that apparently is so goddamn important now, sure let my body/armor/weapon textures be 4k but this random rock or tree that i just sprinted past and never really stop to look at in all its glory, that don't need to eat away at my memory. (Maybe you already do this but i just thought i would mention it anyways.)        

[Arethiel]

I have yet to actually hit the limit anywhere in skyrim with my very heavily modded skyrim with my 970, maybe tone down the 4k textures?

[bjornk]

If you have the money, go for the 980. The 970 is a faulty product. It's like having a nice modern four-door sedan with a problematic fourth door.

[saucemagic]

I have manged to eliminate the stuttering to almost nonexistent through downgrading my textures. But the big thing that fixed the problem was me uninstalling a old file i had from the first day's of me modding skyrim that made all the mountains and rocks 4K. That down grade helped me free up nearly 600 - 750mb of vram in some area's.(kept the it at 1k texture) Thanks for the help my game still looks great and I can save the money. Thanks guys