Can mega MHz RAM compensate for small VRAM?

Hardware GPU
1

Hey guys,

I built my first rig a few years back when the GTX 580 was the best card on the market. And ever year or so since then I have added another 580, which has of course cost less with each purchase. I thought this was the best strategy to get the most out of my hardware for the money.

I now have 3 GTX 580 and a 1440p monitor. The cards are watercooled and overclocked, and the average FPS in challenging games like BF4 is 50-60, but the minimum frame rate can be as low as 5. so the game is really unplayable at that res.

Basically the cards are fast enough, but as soon as that frame buffer fills up the game grinds to a halt. I know this is the reason because I have monitored FB usage and compared it with frame rates.

This third card has now put a major downer on my strategy, which up until now has worked fine. I had to upgrade my PSU, buy a waterblock and fit the 3rd card into my loop and it has achieved very little :(

Anyways after a few years building I was confident I knew what I was doing but turns out I'm still a bit of a noob. I guess there is always more to learn.

I now want to get back ontop of the performance pile for as little as possible. I read somewhere that if you have crazy fast memory that it can be used by the GPU to render frames with minimal lag. This sounds really unlikely but I can upgrade my memory for way less money and hassle than my GPUs.

Thanks in advance, your thoughts are appreciated

z

current specs:

2600k (4.5GHz)

8GB Corsair Dominator GT 1866Mhz

TLDR: My 3x 1.5GB GTX 580s don't have enough VRAM for new games to play at 1440p.

Can super fast memory compensate for a small amount of GPU VRAM. Or is money better spent on a new card?

2

It only can if you're using on board graphics (i.e intel 4000 graphics or the APUs by AMD) as they use your system ram because they don't have their own, this is where higher than 1600mhz ram can be useful for gaming. But when it comes to dedicated graphics cards using regular ram i don't think it's possible

3

Short answer, No.

4

i think the bottleneck is somewhere else. i think your bottleneck is in the triple sli setup, try a dual sli setup at X8 instead of triple X4. maybe this could help, also update drivers and such.

2 GTX580´s should handle BF4 at 1440P maxout verywell, but i thought that ive readed somewhere that BF4 not realy likes sli... but i could be wrong

5

Thanks for the replys

Yeah that's what I thought. I'm gonna get a 780/880 when it comes out.

@MisteryAngel luckily my mobo has pci lane switches, because removing a graphics card when you have watercooling is not a trivial task. I will try your suggestion but I really don't think that is the problem.

see this link: http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Impact-of-PCI-E-Speed-on-Gaming-Performance-518/

6

Bf4 had sli problems but they got patched