Palit NVIDIA GTX460 in Surround: 1GB vs. 2GB - Aliens vs. Predator

Genre: First Person Shooter
Surround Support: Excellent

Aliens vs. Predator was benched with the following settings: DirectX 11, 16xAF, High Shadow Quality, SSAO On, Hardware Tesselation enabled, Advanced Shadow Sampling enabled. Texture quality, resolution and antialiasing were varied, although only the results from ‘Very High’ texture quality are shown here. AvP is a demanding next-generation title which takes advantage of DirectX 11 capable hardware such as the GTX460. I am not very far in this game, so used the downloadable benchmark which in analysis appeared to give similar results to the numbers I have been seeing when actually playing the game.

With a pair of 1GB GTX460s in Surround, it is obvious that Aliens vs. Predator is barely able to keep up at Surround resolutions, and is absolutely impossible with Anti-Aliasing applied at a triplescreen res. If details are dropped to High, oddly framerate decreases further (data not shown).

Once a pair of 2GB cards are in use, it is a different story. AvP is just playable with a minimum framerate of 22fps at a bezel corrected resolution of 6064x1200. Those playing at 5760x1080 (or lower, with WSXGA+ panels) should be able to achieve more than playable framerates in AvP. The increased VRAM has the most marked effect of an increase in minimum framerate, even in scenarios where the game is already performing acceptably with 1GB.

Note that at 6064x1200 4xAA, even the 2GB card appears to run into a VRAM limit, albeit a minor one. This demonstrates very well that a 1GB card does not have enough VRAM to cope with the demands of a DX11 title with all the bells and whistles added. The low readings on the 1GB cards for 5760x1200 4xAA and 6064x1200 4xAA can be attributed to the game attempting to page VRAM data to system RAM, and failing to fill the VRAM as a result. When Alt-Tab was used to move out of the benchmark at one point (during a run where no data was collected) Task Manager reported no free system RAM (of 6GB), presumably it was further utilising the pagefile on the hard drive.