OK folks, I know a lot of you have seen my rants about how 6gb is potentially worthless on this generation of cards, well last night me and 2 close associates decided to whip out a 30 pack of Bud light and spend the evening after putting the kids to bed seeing whats really up with this game,and vram usage, overall performance on 1080p and 1440p and my debate/recommendations on extra VRAM. We spent about 6 hours doing AB comparisons on a BUNCH of scenarios with 2 pairs of cards and 2 monitors at my house. We used my Z87 setup featuring a 4770k and 16gb of ram, a fresh clean OS install and countless different settings based on Nvidia's "recommendations" at their Geforce website. We ended up using 8 different configurations and got some surprising results:
 
The hardware setups:
 
1. 780 ti SLI 1080p monitor, SSD install
2. 780 ti SLI 1080p monitor, 4 way Raid 0 HD install
3. & 4. Same as above but with 1440p monitor
5. Titan SLI(overclocked about 60-70mhz higher than the base clock settings of a 780 ti reference card to compensate for the extra CUDA cores, verified with 2-3 benchmarks to have nearly identical scores), 1080p monitor, SSD install
6. Same as above with 4 way raid 0
7. & 8. Again with 1440p monitor same as 5 & 6.
 
    Check back within the hour or 2, Im going to try and go into as much depth as possible on this one. =D
 
 ANd what are you guys doing Editing out the fact that Bud light IS horse piss? LOL! Piss isn't a bad word in my neck of the woods last I knew. =P

Looking forward to your info

Awesome, can't wait to read!
 
 

I'm very excited to see the results. Thank you for taking the time to go through and do this.

This game is badly optimised. You won't get any good results.

Even I'm waiting to hear this one.  I don't think memory affects things as much as everyone is saying either.  In extremely rare cases, maybe, but in 99.99% of the cases, no.  Having more memory on your card can and sometimes does hurt your overall gaming performance.

Awesome, can't wait to see what your findings are. I just stepped up to 2 6gb 780 SC, from my reg ones. They are on there way to me now! :) Right now I'm on a backup card, gtx 670 4GB ftw. Played watch dogs for a few hours, best I can get is 70 fps on one card with dips to 50 on one monitor with high settings. Full ultra seems to be too much for this gpu with average of 45 fps with dips to 30. I have high hopes my new 780's in SLi will be able to run this game@ 5760x1080 and maintain over 60 fps, closer to 120 would be great. :)

Well, the first thing Im going to mention, is as this game stands right now, its BRUTAL on HARDWARE. Last night was the first time we played this game in depth, and on a number of different configurations...............to quickly state it though.......don't expect to have everything maxed out at 1080p,even with SLI as it stands........... titans, 780 ti's...........if you want all the detail settings maxed out in the graphics option page and NO HITCHING or STUTTERING as some people call it,as you will need to play with AA and texture settings in the display tab to completely eliminate it.
 
   The stuttering that people complain about.
 
Things of note:
 
A. I originally thought optimal settings for my 780 ti's included ultra textures and 4xTXAA, but GFE actually had it set for Ultra with Temporal SMAA. At Ultra textures though, reducing either or both combined reduces the effect people complain about.
 
B. If you got an SSD as your main drive(or secondary) use it. The hitching stuttering effect is LESS noticeable when the game is installed on an SSD. On a single regular HD, its pretty obvious.......on 4 hybrid HD's in RAID 0 its less so, on an SSD its the least of them all.
 
C. Gysnc, also reduces the hitching/stuttering effect people complain about in a minimal way. On 60hz static refresh monitors its again a bit more noticeable(like everything else in all other games)
 
D. Titans and the extra 3gb did not eliminate the stuttering, BUT the effect was a bit less without question. To eliminate the effect at 1080p a pair of Titans had to have textures set to HIGH(And there was still a couple instances here and there where it would show up quickly) with Temporal SMAA as the highest AA used. On a pair of 780 ti's the Textures had to be set to MEDIUM again using temporal SMAA. Neither could run at ULTRA textures without this issue rearing up, again this was using an SSD/Gsync/144hz combo.
 
E. 1440p? Both ran best with textures set to MEDIUM, FXAA and details settings on the graphics tab set one notch lower across the board(setting the details higher, resulted in significant fps loss separate from the issue people complain about and amplified the issue with lower framerates). Again these settings were based on ELIMINATING the hitching/stuttering without bottlenecking the GPU's own performance.
 
    My conclusion so far is that its a more demanding game than let on. There are actually a TON of visual effects that go on in this game, more so than maybe what people realize. Is it because of poor programming and optimization, and will a patch or 2 reduce or eliminate the demands of the game, and get rid of some of the issues people complain about? Don't know............but its sure fun killing civilians!
 
  I will continue to update this thread later today since I still have a pair of Titans on hand and planned to play with this game further this evening. Requests are welcome.
 
 

What driver version did you do your testing?  I don't see you mention it anywhere, unless I missed it.

337.88.....my bad.