What is FB and VID usage in Asus GPU tweak

I'm currently ironing out the kinks on a new system build, and trying to work out the best settings for various games I run. I'm running an Asus GTX 660, and it comes with a piece of software called GPU Tweak, which amongst other things, gives me a live, view of GPU usage, and a reading on what was the highest value reached in a session.

What is VID usage and FB usage? The values don't seem to go very high so, when would these be important?

Solution 1:

In case anyone finds this again and is still wondering, FB usage is the frame buffer usage. Put simply, this is the percentage of the GPU memory which is being used. It's not really anything to worry about unless you are running very close to 100%, at which point your GPU starts to have memory bottlenecks.

VID is essentially the voltage being supplied to the GPU, and is probably being shown as a percentage of the stock voltage (typically around 1.2V).

Solution 2:

The other answer is incorrect regarding VID. VID has nothing to do with the voltage on the card.

VID usage is tied to the built-in hardware H.264 encoder found on GTX6xx and higher cards. (I am not sure if AMD cards have a hardware encoder on-die)

A way to show this is by setting the video format under "Video Capture" in Afterburner to NVENC (Nvidia cards) and then pressing the benchmark button under the "Encoder" drop down OR by video-capturing within a game.

This will show usage since NVENC directly uses the hardware encoder on-die.