GTX970 8GB VRAM 256bit bus limit?

Hardware GPU
1

A question for clever people. I'm looking at getting a couple of GTX970s but I've been waiting for 8GB models to come out. I like the idea of being able to run ultra textures at high framerates in whatever comes out over the next couple of years. There were rumours that they'd be announced or released in December but obviously that hasn't happened.

Today I heard that the 256 bit bus would bottleneck anything above 4GB. Does anyone know if this is true? Should I give up on the dream of a product that will apparently never exist & just pick up 2 current GTX970 models?

2

Yeah we thought back with the Gtx 770's that were 4gb that there was no reason as the logic went that 256 bit couldn't be useful over 2gb's. Also on the Gtx 660's there were ram problems were the stock ram was 2gb, but the 192bit meant that only 1.5gbs ram at full speed. That was a tested and proven thing. So by that logic, if Nvidia didn't get around this problem, then yes 8gbs would be useless. But then on the 970 we already have less bits per gigabyte then on the 660 and don't have a (known) bottleneck. It could be down to the architecture or it could be something that Nvidia already found a way around.     

3

I think it's a waste. You might see better preformance on higher resolutions, but even so... 256bit is just to small for a flagship card imo

4

nVidia is using a new compression algorithm.  256bit is enough.

5

Enough for 4GB.  I'm skeptical about 8GB.

6

True - however the point of an 8GB version is for multi gpu.  As sli/xfire ram does not stack, the extra ram is for dual gpu setups.  I would be surprised if there are any games that can actually utilize 8gb of vram with a single gpu. (and more than willing to be proven wrong)

7

Shadow of mordor had a 6gb recommendation for the ultra texture pack or whatever it was called. It ended up being necessary to have all that ram to play it without glitches due to lack of enough ram. But only with that ridiculous texture setting.  

8

Exactly, if Shadow of Mordor already exceeds 4GB for ultra settings, what will we see over the next couple of years? I'm really looking forward to The Witcher 3 & I know that will be a real system hog.

9

Yes, this does bottleneck the memory. As shown in benchmarks, the 970 just isn't great at high resolutions- that is the result of the small memory bandwidth.