GeForce G310 Fermi - Nvidia news! 2010

Conclusion - Final

In a nutshell, then, for a gaming card, 2GB makes absolutely no difference than 1GB. A different situation would be in the case of a professional card, such as the Quadro or FireGL: in this case, the purposes of the card are very different and each case should be valued separately.

Although professional usage would mean using a professional card, in some situations outside gaming, perhaps the extra GB on the Gigabyte solution could be used, making the extra memory a true advantage, which is clearly not the case when it comes to a gaming situation.

Conclusions - Part 1

As the tests have demonstrated, there’s no need for a 2GB graphic card, at least not with the titles we’ve tested. It’s a simple marketing move that goes back to the times where in order to sell the biggest number of cards, it was common to add more memory to the graphic processors.

No matter what resolution is used or the game played, 1GB is more than enough to cater for every need. The reason for that could be that the current limit that game developers use is 1GB.

Energy requirements

Here are the numbers for the energy consumption for the Gigabyte card:

Idle -  170 W
Full Load - 364 W

Compared to the 159 and 357 Watts from the reference model. Higher frequencies generally result in higher energy consumption and with this solution, it’s not difference. The difference is very small, but it’s there due to the factory overclock done in this model.

GTA IV

The last title used on the testing sessions was GTA IV. The game allows the user to choose not only the texture quality, but also the rendering and the view distance. These three elements, together with the resolution, are heavy on the memory usage, and they can be a good measurement on how much is or isn’t used. And they also show, in the gaming options, the exact number of MB used for each of the options. A good tool to use. By simply maximizing the view distance, for example, there’s a high increase of memory usage. Putting the texture quality to high, the memory requirements go beyond the 1GB mark, which could mean a big difference in the extra GB that the solution we are reviewing has.

But let’s see the frames per second found when testing.

Medium textures - high rendering - view distance: 50


Gigabyte GeForce GTX285 2GB

- 2560×1600 - 47
- 1920×1200 - 56

GeForce GTX 285 1GB Overclocked

- 2560×1600 - 47
- 1920×1200 - 56

Medium texture - high rendering - visual distance: 100

Gigabyte GeForce GTX285 2GB

- 2560×1600 - 45
- 1920×1200 - 55

GeForce GTX 285 1GB Overclocked

- 2560×1600 - 45
- 1920×1200 - 55

As we can see, there’s absolutely no difference in performances up until when the extra GB is needed in order to play with high textures and the maximum view distance. In this case, we haven’t performed the testing as it would have been impossible to compare with the 1GB Overclocked version of the GTX285. Only in that scenario, when a user wants to set this game to the maximum view distance and the maximum texture quality, we can see a real difference for the second GB on the Gigabyte solution.

Devil May Cry - Scene 1 - AA 4x (DirectX 10)

Gigabyte GeForce GTX285 2GB

- 2560×1600 - 96
- 1920×1200 - 145

GeForce GTX 285 1GB Overclocked

- 2560×1600 - 95
- 1920×1200 - 143

Devil May Cry - Scene 2 - AA 4x (DirectX 10)

Gigabyte GeForce GTX285 2GB

- 2560×1600 - 66
- 1920×1200 - 102

GeForce GTX 285 1GB Overclocked

- 2560×1600 - 66
- 1920×1200 - 96

Devil May Cry - Scene 3 - AA 4x (DirectX 10)

Gigabyte GeForce GTX285 2GB

- 2560×1600 - 117
- 1920×1200 - 175

GeForce GTX 285 1GB Overclocked

- 2560×1600 - 117
- 1920×1200 - 175

Devil May Cry - scene 4 - AA 4x (DirectX 10)

Gigabyte GeForce GTX285 2GB

- 2560×1600 - 71
- 1920×1200 - 99

GeForce GTX 285 1GB Overclocked

- 2560×1600 - 71
- 1920×1200 - 99

Similarly to the previous games, also Devil May Cry cannot go past the first GB on the card, despite the high resolutions and the anti-aliasing 4x.

Crysis - High Quality, no AA - AF 16x

Gigabyte GeForce GTX285 2GB

- 2560×1600 - 28
- 1920×1200 - 46

GeForce GTX 285 1GB Overclocked

- 2560×1600 - 28
- 1920×1200 - 46

Crysis (DirectX 10) - High - no AA - AF 16x

Gigabyte GeForce GTX285 2GB

- 2560×1600 - 28
- 1920×1200 - 43

GeForce GTX 285 1GB Overclocked

- 2560×1600 - 28
- 1920×1200 - 43

Crysis Warhead - High - No AA - AF 16x

Gigabyte GeForce GTX285 2GB

- 2560×1600 - 22
- 1920×1200 - 40

GeForce GTX 285 1GB Overclocked

- 2560×1600 - 21
- 1920×1200 - 40

Crysis Warhead (DirectX 10) - high - No AA - AF 16x

Gigabyte GeForce GTX285 2GB

- 2560×1600 - 26
- 1920×1200 - 37

GeForce GTX 285 1GB Overclocked

- 2560×1600 - 26
- 1920×1200 - 37

Crysis and Crysis Warhead are two titles that are highly demanding on the GPU, but again, no difference from the extra GB and an overclocked 1GB card.