Ask GN 31: VRAM Used Inaccurate, Frametime Impact on Smoothness

By Steve Burke Published October 24, 2016 at 10:12 am

Hardware

This episode of Ask GN focuses on some more technical topics – and ones which we were happy to address in more episodic fashion. The first question asked us to address why a framerate in excess of the refresh rate appears to allow smoother gameplay. It's a good question, too; it'd seem like the excess doesn't actually add anything, if just thinking about a 60Hz target, but there's a lot more to it than that.

This topic leads to discussion on monitor overclocking and VRAM measurements and consumption. We've previously covered monitor overclocking, for the curious, and we've also previously talked about how GPU-Z doesn't accurately measure VRAM consumption. It's more a measurement of VRAM requested by the game, and because some games will just ask for all the memory, it's hard to know how much is actually utilized (rather than reserved). We talk about that more in the content below:

Question Timestamps

1:43 - Dr Nooberious: "Why is it that when using a frame rate higher than the refresh rate, the games look and feel smoother??"

9:23 - Adrian Cabaddu: "Why are games (most AAA games) doesn't utilized the extra power of hyper-threading? It doesn't make any sense that most modern AAA games require 4 cores and not utilizing CPU's with more than 4 cores or w/ hyper-threading? Thanks Steve for answering my inquiry.?"

12:47 - Teemo4Life: "Is overclocking my monitor safe? Will it reduce the life span? I clocked mine to 66 hertz. Is it worth it?"

15:24 - foreign's gaming tech: "Damn Steve, you always look so tired. My question would be: as far as I've heard most of the monitoring applications show requested VRAM, not actually used VRAM (so it will show how much the game wants, not how much it uses). How true is that and are there ways to measure "occupied" VRAM instead of requested??"

17:08 - FD: "You mentioned in the video that Intel's PR has changed to the point where you would rather buy it than request one to review. Could you elaborate on that? What has changed specifically and, if you could, walk us through the process of acquiring tech for review?"

19:18 - Kureiji Otaku: "Dear steve, can we get a sexy hair flip at the end of the video??"

Host: Steve “Lelldorianx” Burke
Video: Andrew “ColossalCake” Coleman

Ask GN

Steve Burke

Steve started GamersNexus back when it was just a cool name, and now it's grown into an expansive website with an overwhelming amount of features. He recalls his first difficult decision with GN's direction: "I didn't know whether or not I wanted 'Gamers' to have a possessive apostrophe -- I mean, grammatically it should, but I didn't like it in the name. It was ugly. I also had people who were typing apostrophes into the address bar - sigh. It made sense to just leave it as 'Gamers.'"

First world problems, Steve. First world problems.