Gigabyte GeForce GTX 760 4GB Video Card Review – 2GB or 4GB of VRAM
Final Thoughts and Conclusions
If you are shopping for an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 video card and are deciding between a 2GB and 4GB version you aren’t alone. We’ve had a ton of people ask us the same question and we figured that we’d do some testing to help others that might be wondering about it as well. Most gamers say that you want as much VRAM as possible, but very few have done any testing to back that up!
Gigabyte currently offers the Gigabyte GTX 760 GDDR5-2GB for $259.99 and the Gigabyte GTX760 GDDR5-4GB for $299.99. The cards are identical other than the amount of the frame buffer. The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 760 video card in general is a very nice card. It is factory overclocked, fairly quiet and runs super cool (27C idle and 64C load). So, should you spay $40 more to double up on the memory? Our testing showed that while there were some benefits at Ultra HD resolutions on some game titles it wasn’t enough to significantly impact the gaming experience. The issue with the GeForce GTX 760 series is that it is power by the GK104 Kepler GPU and there is only so many pixels that the 1152 stream processors and 32 ROPs can handle. This means that while the additional memory did help when gaming at 4K resolutions in Far Cry 3, the GPU itself didn’t have enough horse power to provide a smooth gaming experience. We would still get stuttering and tearing when gaming despite the fact that we had enough memory to render the scenes.
If you are looking to spend GeForce GTX 760 money and are considering spending an extra $40 for additional memory we highly suggest that you consider moving up to the GeForce GTX 770 series. The entry level GeForce GTX 770 video cards start at just $312.99 shipped and you can pick up the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 GDDR5-2GB that we reviewed back in June 2013 for $334.99. The GeForce GTX 770 series uses the same GK 104 GPU and has 2GB of GDDR5 memory, but it has 1536 stream processors versus the 1152 on the GeForce GTX 760. If you game at 1680×1050, 1920×1080 or 1920×1200 you’ll see a nice performance improvement across the board by stepping up to the GeForce GTX 770 series for as little as $13 more than a GeForce GTX 760 4GB. If you are an Ultra HD gamer or have a multi-monitor setup then you need to move to something more powerful like the GeForce GTX 780 3GB with the Gk110 GPU or the AMD Radeon R9 280X 3GB with the Tahiti GPU. Both of those cards have the horsepower and frame buffer needed to properly push a multi-monitor setup and most single Ultra HD monitors.
Legit Bottom Line: The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 760 4GB video card is a very nice card, but by the time we see the performance advantages of having 4GB of memory it doesn’t matter as the overall GPU performance is too low to have an enjoyable gaming experience.