Question: Built this computer about 2 and 1/4 years ago. I used a HDD because it was a cheap build. Recently, download speeds have been awful. When downloading a program 2 days ago, the hard drive was downloading at about 10MB/s. I am almost certain I remember it at about 80MB/s just 4 days ago. Also, I’ve been trying to play COD Warzone with my brother on PS4. He has 0 frame issues on an older PS4 while I would guess I am around 20 a lot of the time on low settings. In task manager, I use about 40% of CPU and about 80% RAM, but disk is always at 100% which is why I wonder about this.
My questions:
Can hard drive performance affect game quality/frames?How can I test hard drive performance apart from task manager?
Answer:How does vram get loaded?
It comes from the hard drive and the game.
How important this can be is not known.
VRAM has become a marketing issue.
My understanding is that vram is more of a performance issue than a functional issue.
A game needs to have most of the data in vram that it uses most of the time.
Somewhat like real ram.
If a game needs something not in vram, it needs to get it across the pcie boundary
hopefully from real ram and hopefully not from a hard drive.
It is not informative to know to what level the available vram is filled.
Possibly much of what is there is not needed.
What is not known is the rate of vram exchange.
Vram is managed by the Graphics card driver, and by the game. There may be differences in effectiveness between amd and nvidia cards.
And differences between games.
Here is an older performance test comparing 2gb with 4gb vram.
Video Card Performance: 2GB vs 4GB MemorySimilar video cards are often available in versions with more than one memory size. The GeForce GTX 680 is an example, and comes in both 2GB and 4GB variants. With computer components more is often better, but does doubling the memory on a video card like this actually help with game performance…www.pugetsystems.comSpoiler… not a significant difference.
A more current set of tests shows the same results:
http://www.techspot.com/review/1114-vram-comparison-test/page5.html
And… no game maker wants to limit their market by
requiring huge amounts of vram. The vram you see will be appropriate to the particular card.
On ram, 80 hard faults per second can be forever particularly on a laptop 5400 rpm drive.
The process of swapping a page out to a drive and loading in the needed code can take 40ms effectively stopping the cpu from advancing the app for the duration.
The only fix is to use less or get more ram.