Nobody knows that it is going to make a huge difference. 2GB of vRAM DDR5 + 8GB DDR3 is not crippled by any means. People are just guessing w/o any real evidence that it might make a difference in the future.
Worse comes to worse, when you play this Fall's new releases, you might not want to leave 20 Google Chrome windows open while you game. That's about the extent of it as far as I see.
I agree that 2GB of vRAM DDR5 + 8GB DDR3 is currently way more than sufficient to run games at their best at 1080p minimum
Memory bandwidth is just as important as the amount when you are talking about super high resolutions. I'm not saying the 670/760 or the 680/770 (they are the same cards p'much) are going to do poorly, I'm just not convinced that either is a good bet for 'next gen' yet because of that limitation.
In a lot of tests, the 4GB variants have been shown to not make a big difference, or zero difference at all.
They are really great cards right now though.
A PC idling is not a lot of heat. We're talking 50-120W of heat.
This is also true that 4GB variants haven't shown much difference.
My opinion comes partly from reading the 770 review from anandtech:
"Our advice then for prospective buyers is to first look at benchmarks for the games they intend to play....Otherwise for gamers facing a wide selection of games or looking at future games where their performance is unknown,
then the GTX 770 and 7970GE are in fact tied, and from a performance perspective you couldn’t go wrong with either one."
"Having 2GB of RAM doesn’t impose any real problems today, but I’m left to wonder for how much longer that’s going to be true. The wildcard in all of this will be the next-generation consoles, each of which packs 8GB of RAM, which is quite a lot of RAM for video operations even after everything else is accounted for. With most PC games being ports of console games, there’s a
decent risk of 2GB cards being undersized when used with high resolutions and the highest quality art assets.....The solution for better or worse is doubling the GTX 770 to 4GB.
GTX 770 is capable of housing 4GB, and NVIDIA’s partners will be selling 4GB cards in the near future, so 4GB cards will at least be an option.....4GB would certainly make the GTX 770 future-proof in that respect, and I suspect it’s a good idea for anyone on a long upgrade cycle, but
as always this is a bit of a gamble."
And I agree with anadtech and also suggest going with the 4GB if you can because a few years ago I got myself an MSI 560Ti Hawk. Yes I picked the super OC'ed edition over the no/less OC'ed 2GB version and that was my mistake. When it comes to running BF3 on Ultra or Crysis 3 on Ultra in 1080p, there are no major issues, but occasionally there can be alot of stuttering, and I understand this is due to my 1GB ram limit. Meaning I have to compromise and turn down shadows, AA etc. I can't remember exactly but I read somewhere that BF3 on Ultra at 1080p should at least have more than 1GB available on the graphics card.
But if you picked up the 770 at 2GB, that's a great buy!! Definitely a good, buy I wish I could buy that in fact if I had the $ (also the stock cooler looks damn sweet). Right now and probably for the next 6 months at least it's gonna be way more than sufficient to run all the ports and PC games at 1080p at least at Ultra settings I'm quite sure.
I was just suggesting that if you were going to buy a 770 right now, might as well go for the 4GB version if you can. Seems like the best route to pick for future games/ports (even though we know future proofing your PC is just about the most useless thing one can do
)
Good luck!
