Palit NVIDIA GTX460 in Surround: 1GB vs. 2GB - Burnout Paradise

Genre: Racing
Surround Support: Excellent

All settings at max, except SSAO which was off. Even at 1920x1200, SSAO makes framerates tank. Game is capped at 60fps regardless of forcing Vsync off in Control Panel. Resolution and AA varied. I chose to drive around Paradise in a Jensen X12 (which is fast) as the game dynamically loads textures as it needs them – I would start in the East of Paradise City and drive West through the city to the Wind Farm. This involves a lot of traffic, and a lot of textures change. This makes the texture buffering work hard to swap required textures in and out as necessary. SSAO was OFF, as it makes framerates tank regardless of resolution.

Burnout Paradise, even at maximum (not including SSAO) is quite obviously not the most demanding of games. It runs well at all resolutions, and like DiRT 2, exhibits an obvious 60fps framerate cap.

With 2GB cards, the framerate cap becomes the limiting factor. It is plainly evident that even the highest settings are fully playable at extremely high resolutions in Burnout Paradise.

Looking at the VRAM usage shows why Burnout Paradise runs so well: even at high resolutions, the only time it really eats VRAM is at 6064x1200 8xAA. Burnout Paradise actually gives a good opportunity to look at something else: VRAM usage is not quite so efficient on the 2GB cards as the 1GB ones. At the same settings, a 2GB card will always use a few more MB of VRAM than a 1GB card. A limitation of the memory controller? This may be examined in more detail in the future if I am able.