You will need ~$650 bucks to match next gen consoles on PC

[disolitude]

ethomaz said:

disolitude said:

I suppose thats the memory utilized by Killzone?

If it is, thanks for proving me right.

This game would run fine on a 1gb nvidia card with its 800mb render targets. some textures may suffer from pop in but it wont be too noticable.

When running out of VRAM, modern GPUs will run into a hybrid mode where the drivers/GPU start streaming texture data from system RAM over the PCIe bus to make up for the "missing" RAM.  All this other stuff can be loaded on the fly as the card needs it...pixel shaders, textures...etc... but if render target absolutely can not be > than VRAM, if it is, you get bottleneck and frame rate drops.

You misunderstood again... only 572MB is cache.... everything else is used to make the scene... you need the used texture loaded in memory to use them.

I didn't missunderstand anything... 

If you think that 1321 MB of textures will all get pushed at the same time on screen, you're wrong, mistaken or confused.

The game may use 1321 MB of textures during 1 scene which sit in the VRAM, but they are going to render 200-300MB at the time. Texture compression these days is so good that 200-300 MB of textures can easily render 1 GB of on-screen textures. And when try to push more on the screen at once, the GPU can not keep up any more. Look at the example above. GTX 680 SLI barely rendering over 60 FPS... not a VRAM bottleneck but a GPU bottleneck.

Finally when the game has to use more textures than it can store in to VRAM, it uses system memory. Look up Nvidias "Turbo cache" technology. 

Bottom line is that unless your frame buffer needs to be 3 GB you will not run out of VRAM...but keep thinking PS4 will revolutionize everything.