GTX 960 2GB vs. 4GB in 2019 – Did It End Up Mattering?

2021 and a 2gig will cost £100

this is 2021, can you please stop hogging GPUs? thanks :P

im still using it goin strong!

I remember my old 960 2 GB. It was paired with a 1440 P monitor, because it was an Alienware, and they must have wanted me to suffer. I remember thinking, “God. Why the fuck did they think 2GB would work with this resolution?! Why did they put this in a $3500 computer?!”

So I overclock the shit out of it. I’m talking 400 MHz core overclock (350 if I was playing it safe) and 200 MHz on the memory. Then I would lock the fan to 90% and pray. That thing sounded like a Boeing 747 taking off on my desk. BUT I was able to run GTA five with a mix of high and very high settings at 1440 P and get anywhere from 57 to 61 FPS.

It was a great card that was absolutely crippled by Vram. Now I have a 1650 factory overclocked that I got for $80 off Reddit. The 960 is running with an i5 4560 and is quite happy.

I am very happy with it. I’m thinking my endgame is going to be an RTX 2060, but I don’t know how much that will be held back by the CPU. I’m considering upgrading to a 5820 eventually, but I don’t know if that would give me any performance increase over my current 4790. That should get me to 2025, when I can get a Ryzen 5 8600 or something.

Also, GTA runs so much worse now. I used to get 60fps in online, but in 2021, it gets about 35fps with terrible stuttering (on the 960). Nothing can possibly justify a performance hit like that unless rockstar is mining crypto on my card.

Quite a pointless test. A proper one would have decreased resolution and quality to allow the two cards to hit ~60 fps and then look at 1% low numbers to see if any of them just couldn't keep up with modern games no matter what. After all, it's far easier to live with low quality and low resolution than stuttering.

As someone who is about to go from Asus Turbo GTX 960 2 GB to an Asus Turbo GTX 960 4 GB, this is a very good video. :)

Miss the fancy hair though.

Great video! Thanks for the super detailed comparison. I still have the ASUS STRIX GTX 960 2GB GDDR5 Direct CUII and play mostly League of Legends. My rig is i3 4170 3,7GHz, HyperX Savage 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz RAM. I waiting for an i5 4690 to be delivered (yes, in 2020!) So let me know what GPU should I upgrade to... Nvidia options please. I would like to play Battlefield 1, 5, Dayz Standalone in 1080p

Possible debate in 2020/2021: 16 GB vs. 20 GB

No difference between 2gb and 4gb of gtx 960

Could you review the XFX 7800GT in the background?
I love those cards, I had an XFX 7950GT silent edition back in the day. Awesome card, looked amazing too; XFX were pioneers when it came to ascetics on hardware.

My gtx960 4GB Strix still holds it own on modern games, it hasnt got tired yet. Though it has bags under it's eyes.

So conclusion: Not worth?

How many fps can I catch with them? In games like CSGO
(Intel i5, 8 gb ram, nvidia gtx 960 12gb ram, 500gb hdd)

what about 6gb? it seems to be holding up even for 1440p for the time

I bought the 2GB version and then the 4GB version came out. Sold the 2GB and upgraded to the 970








and it has 3.5GB Vram. Fuck Nvidia.

Damn, those extra $20 I paid for my 4 GB card 4 years ago were well spent. I still use my 960, but that's because I don't game as much, so I can't justify spend the price for a new gpu.

Seems like the 960 4GB is meant for SLI, since in many games it doesnt even manage to fill the 4 Gigs by itself, while maintaining playable FPS

عطينى الذبدى يا شيخ ليش انت كتر الكلام

Actually the 2 to 4 cards are only a few fps, but if for example you are going to play with shadows that consume a lot of vram, if it is true that a 4 gb of vram will be much better

had a MSI 960 2Gb Armor and later a Zotac 960 4Gb amp! -


found the 4Gb Version to deliver much smoother gameplay in PUBG, had a lot of stuttering with 2GB Version.
in a nutshell: the higher your texture settings, the more you will suffer with the 2gb version.
was still playable with the 2gb version, but would never go back to less than 4Gb VRAM.

having the additional 2gb vram doesnt mean much if your just hitting 30 fps in games when the Graphics processor itself is not enough. Just go for a 2gb 960 and when getting 4gb to 8gb cards look for a more powerful card like a GTX1060 and rx570 and up for those 4gb vram and up.

This video brings me back to late 2014-early 2015 ish when I was using Windows 10 Insider Preview. It was more stable than 8.1 despite being a preview. Also it didn’t have live tiles up until close to release.

Dude, you're like a unicorn! That's the first time I've heard an American call her Lara instead of Laura!

Very cool video dude

I always wondered if it would be worth running two 4GB cards in SLI if you could pick up a second one on the cheap these days, to maybe better utilise the 4GB of vram.

Thanks for this i am picking up a 2gb 960 in place of mt gts 450.... the 450 plays watch dogs 2 decent crashes on heavy load and fortnite is 130 fps the 450 is the bomb i have the 1.5 gb card. im poor so the gtx 960 is 40 bucks on facebook !!!!!!

Your answer is always "it depends."

i have a pc with specs core i5 2400 and 8 gigs of ram with gtx 960 wgb but when i teset it i fortnite( loweset ) i get 120 to 150 fps but dont know why have fps drops like it drops down
to 60 and 30 too if someone is asking for gpu usage so my gpu usage at loweset preset is 75 to 80 and cpu almost same but plzz if someone is able to help me plzz <3

pointless

Should I upgrade from my 960 2gb to 1660 ti? I have i5 4570 and 500W psu which only has 6pin

hell, it mattered back when they came out. i'd still be using my GTX 770s if they'd been 4GBs

Anyone else have gtx 960 4gb?

As an idea for a future video, if we're looking at old cards, would be "how well does a 980Ti hold up today?"

IMHO when it comes to computer memory in general (and other things too), it's better to have more than one thinks one will need than to need more than one has.

When my intended purchase of a GTX 970 fell through due to discovering a then 1-year-old thread detailing a yet unresolved DP issue affecting some monitors, I opted for a STRIX-GTX960-DC2OC-4GD5 in stead of its 2GB stable mate--in spite of the prevailing Internet lore. Why? Because for a mere 10% increase in price, the 4GB unit forever banished any performance deficit related to a paucity of RAM.

I bought an MSI GTX 1070 Gaming Z back in 2016. Best card I've ever owned. I don't see myself replacing it anytime soon.

You should do a "Did it End up Mattering?" video about the GTX 970 and if the 3.5gb fast memory + 0.5gb slow memory matter compared to same speed 4gb cards from the time

I've always felt and found that the benefit of going overboard on vRAM is that if it doesn't cost much more (sometimes it really can be like $10) it can provide a benefit over time of being able to use higher quality assets than a smaller Capacity model could, while still retaining about the same performance.
So a longevity thing really, in play being like say if a 2/4 gig model can do 1080p60 at medium in a game a few years after the card was made, the higher Capacity model will generally be able to do the same at med-high or high.
By being able to utilize more visual effects that are cheap but cost Memory (of which there are a fair amount, really) than a lower Capacity model could. It all comes down to thr pricing though, it's gotta be able to undercut just buying a more expensive GPU enough to give it some purpose.


I guess there's also non Gaming workloads which do tend to scale very well with vRAM if they utilize the GPU.

Next try GTX 760

Back in late 2015, I got the 4GB EVGA GTX 960 SSC over the 2GB version because the cost of the 2GB version, along with the additional cost of getting a backplate for it, which it didn't originally come with, vs. the cost of the 4GB version, which did come with a backplate, was effectively the same (excluding P&P). So, with the 4GB version I basically got either an extra 2GB for free, or a free backplate with the 4GB version, depending on how you look at it. ;-)

The original is the video i came to the channel from and ive been watching ever since

I have a 980, its a very good card

It would be interesting to see the R9 380 2Gb vs R9 380 4Gb in another video, just to see how they have aged in relation to the GTX 960

4gb matters way more when you sli them.

The if you are only running 8GB of system ram you will see a larger difference as the system off loads data from the gpu to the ram and fights over space with the game I think. While if you have 16GB system memory there is enough room for the gpu to use the system ram as an extra buffer.

I rather see this with R9 380...

Could you guys revisit the best gpu for 3440x1440 video for current gpus and banchmarks etc?

I am very angry that i have a 2GB card. Forza Horizon 3 isn't playable AT ALL with this amount of VRAM. Not even at 720p. It's plain impossible to reduce settings far enough for it to work, and to the extent that it can be done, you still get a VRAM warning from the game every few minutes, the next moment newly spawned in textures are a blobby mess, and shortly afterwards the game will crash. It's not detail differences, many textures aren't even recognisable as to what they're supposed to represent once this game starts running out of VRAM. Similar to what you have seen in Sniper Elite in 4k, but worse.

And i'm borderline angry at this review that it fails to mention fundamental compatibility hurdles such as this.

Average framerates may be the same, but would the game have more stutters because of memory swapping when the VRAM is full ?