VRAM question

hello, I'm going to buy a laptop to replace my desktop pc and am looking at the asus g750 with the nvidia gtx 765m which has 2gb of vram and wonder if it is enough to play PA at decent quality smoothly on a 1080p screen. I ask this question because my desktop has a 1080p screen and 1gb ram but it craps itself playing pa even on low haha. (my desktop is on a 2500k 8gb ram using an ati 5770 1gb)

highly recommend desktops myself. What's your desktop specs? Maker? CPU? Graphics? Ram?

oh I'm blind, eem well, it should play pa as well as new laptops. My specs are lower I think but mine runs smoothly so you might be a victim of bad settings or something.

well my specs the same minus nvidia 9500gt but same kind of CPU and same number of ram and gpu size.

At moment you might might get better performance in this particular game because AMD GPUs not yet perform as well as Nvidia, but in other games you not likely get any real performance improvement because laptop CPUs/GPUs are way slower than proper desktop hardware. E.g I seriously doubt any laptop CPU have performance that anywhere near to 2500K.

So on large planets you'll have advantage with 2GB VRAM and Nvidia most likely will perform better, but in general this will be downgrade because laptop graphics extremely slow:
http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-765M-vs-GeForce-GTX-760
Check "Benchmarks" section here, it's 2-3 times slower.

PS: If we forget about PA specifics that might change with any update with GTX 765M you'll get slightly better performance than you have now with 5770:
http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-HD-5770-vs-GeForce-GTX-765M
Though there not enough data for exactly those GPUs, but you can compare other models from same series.

My desktop does get 30fps at the start of a game at lowest settings and only gets lower from there might be an ati thing.

I do agree that desktops are in general better for performance, but laptop suits my situation better i travel a bit.

Amusingly the i7 4700hq in the g750 is more powerful than my desktop 2500k according to passmark scores I've seen, probably has more to do with being 2 generations newer.

The question for me is will the 2gb of vram limit me significantly at 1080p with how well i can run the game or the sizes of games I can play in, i.e. number of players and planets. There are 3gb versions of the laptop available but I would rather not spend the extra if it wont benefit me much the price gap is large.

It's good if you understand that and can realistically measure laptop graphics performance.

From my own experience 2GB should be enough for PA because there is "virtual texture" option in settings that let you adjust video memory usage.

Slow laptop GPU won't able to use advantage of 3GB VRAM anyway because you'll met GPU performance limit before VRAM limit.

Also here is topic where I'm asked mostly same question and get answer from devs:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/question-to-devs-about-vram-usage.51325/

I play the game on an Asus, intel 3610QM, 8GB Mem, 650M with 2gb of Vram.

Game runs well enough. Not as wonderfully as I'd like, but it runs well enough.

I move around a lot too so I have a i7 4700MQ with a 2g 765m with 8 gig of RAM. Probably the very type of system you are looking at. It is a Clevo laptop with a 1080p screen, though when i can i plug it into a 24" 1080p screen (so no difference on gpu strain). Anyway, For the most part it runs PA fairly well and i have textures on high and anti-aliasing on so it looks pretty good. You would have to tell me the size of games that you play for me to know how to compare in a more meaningful way though. If I had had a little extra money at the time and didn't want a very small laptop then getting the 770m is a nice jump in performance over the 765m, much more that the 5 difference might suggest At the moment the 765m is not really good enough to use PIP though I hope this will change as more optimisations come in. Or I hope Uber develop a more conventional mini-map so not everything has to be rendered twice.

As others have said a laptop GPU will be a lot slower than a desktop one with the heat and power limitations but don't worry about CPU's, I have looked into quite a few benchmarks and there is little difference between laptop and desktop ones now (EDIT: obviously i mean the decent laptop CPU's like i7's etc.), certainly nothing like the GPU difference. The CPU I have is the standard one for gaming laptops and it holds up very well I think. Get a SSD too, makes things snappy. I have a 240g msata drive/stick, it's physical dimensions are so small! Ah, how technology changes....
Other than PA it performs admirably in other games, though you have to make sure the 765m is selected as sometimes a game will run using the intel 4600 gpu as default and that ain't so good!

That sounds pricy. Especially SSD, thats a quality of life sort of thing that only benefits awful console port games (which are used to loading assets literally from memory and not ram or anything, and weren't ported correctly to attempt to do otherwise)

Not as bad as your are thinking. I bought the laptop while living in China last year and got it for a very good price indeed. I bought the SSD seperately. The SSD could be said to be a luxury but the prices have come down a lot and I often have a lot of tabs open at once and that got terribly slow on my old laptop but with the SSD everything is pretty instant all the time so it is nice to have

I'm with everyone on this, divert this trainwreck to upgrading the desktop instead and waiting for optimization upgrades, you'll save lives and become a hero.

there is no way in three blue hells you'll get better results with whatever g750 laptop you where planning to buy, instead of getting the 750 itself for your desktop.

VRAM handles textures and stuff of the sort, and it's usage increases primarily when you increase the resolution. 2GB is currently about 512MB extra than when I run the game maxed with 175% super scaling on a 1080p screen. 3GB is too much currently, and I doubt you'll use 3GB in any game, though you might use just over 2GB.

a full 1080p g-buffer is like 150 megs, not that much for a multigigabyte card.

Your 2500K is a very good cpu. I would just upgrade your video card.

VRAM is used for far more than renderbuffers. All the textures/texture atlases. All the geometry. The PA devs mentioned many times that e.g. effects actually are meshes that are assembled on the CPU and then piped over every frame (which is.... a reasonable .... starting point .... to implement them, certainly...). Well, that will also consume VRAM.

At insane resolutions like 4K one might see VRAM usage blow through the roof due to frame buffers being 4x larger but it's still hard to see this becoming more than 1GB unless multisampling is also cranked up, at which point we are dealing with way too many pixels that have to be shaded to be realistic (at least, if we're still talking about the nice pretty shaders seen in PA). It's basically entirely up to devs to properly make use of VRAM (and how the game's performance will respond to VRAM limits, that is to say how quickly it gets filled and how well such an event is handled)

@tarvoldz, would you mind doing a profile capture and then uploading it here. Can you also do screenshots of all the ctrl+p screens. To do a profile capture you press ctrl+f11 and then you can find it under appdata folder under your username on windows. Can you make sure that the lowest frame rate.

location:
C:\Users\YOUR_WINDOWS_USERNAME\AppData\Local\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\PerfLogs\

I have a XFX 5770 1 GB.

Can I just point something out here?

If you are a university student, there is a good chance that you will need to drag a laptop along with you to lectures, to group project meetings, etc. Because computer lab access can suck, and often there aren't many free power points left in a building, because people set up camp beside each and every one to charge something electrical. I.e. Laptops are more mobile than desktops, and can run off their own battery power.

Having a laptop is a LOT more convenient if you are going to travel to university across the country/continent or ocean. Or even just taking your computer to uni every day.

That is one situation where a laptop is preferable to a desktop. Can't transport a desktop on a plane with my clothes for uni easily (bulky) without paying extra money I cannot afford.

There is a good chance that the choice to have a laptop is not necessarily an option, but one of necessity.

The great big clue here is 'I am going to replace my desktop with a laptop'.

The fact that the laptop can run games is sometimes secondary to the fact that it is a laptop.

I.e. if someone says 'I want a laptop,' respect that. No it is not as great as a gaming PC. But it's a laptop, not a desktop

Good GPU is secondary to mobile GPU.

TLDR: Performance isn't anything, mobile/convenience is worth considering as well.

OP wanted it to replace his desktop though, something it cannot possibly do.

I'm just going to edit my post a lot so that the reason why it is a valid replacement for a desktop is more evident.

Notice the theme?

Right but OP didn't mention any of those. You did, and you alone. He said he wanted a desktop replacement, which is literally the worst idea in the world. Overpriced, poor as a desktop machine, not as portable as a smaller laptop, bad battery life.