8GB VRAM not enough (and 10 / 12)

BFG10K · Jul 13, 2021

8GB

Dying Light 2, Battlefield 2042, Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, Starfield, Forza Horizon 5, Horizon Forbidden West, Alan Wake 2, The Last of Us, Tekken 8, FC 24, Detroit Become Human, Death Stranding, Alone in The Dark, Overwatch 2
3060 12GB higher 1% low than 4060 8GB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIfz57wmywg
Cyberpunk 2077, Diablo 4, Hogwarts Legacy, Horizon Zero Dawn, Microsoft Flight Sim 2020, Witcher 3, Watch Dogs Legion skip to 4K + DLSS for each game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPiaWWd0xGc
Ratchet & Clank, Plague Tale Requiem, Last Of Us, Jedi Survivor, Far Cry 6, Hogwarts Legacy, Forza Horizon 5, Cyberpunk 2077 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr3MckDxMfE&pp=ygUTMTZnYiB2cyA4Z2IgNDA2MCB0aQ==
Far Cry 6, Godfall, Hogwarts Legacy, Forza Horizon 5, Forspoken, Doom Eternal, Watchdogs Legion https://youtu.be/fJc--C01P90?t=268
Last Of Us, Resident Evil 4, Callisto Protocol, Plague Tale Requiem, Halo Infinite, Forspoken https://youtu.be/2_Y3E631ro8?t=429
Last Of Us, Hogwarts Legacy, Resident Evil 4, Forspoken, Plague Tale Requiem, Callisto Protocol https://youtu.be/Rh7kFgHe21k?t=288
Hogwarts Legacy, Last Of Us, Spider Man Remastered, Doom Eternal, Forza Horizon 5 https://youtu.be/R943CbDTq_s?t=1473
Horizon Forbidden West 4060 has issues @ 1080p + DLSS unless you switch off frame generation and reduce settings to high https://youtu.be/3AyKvI23VGw?t=233
Horizon Forbidden West 3070 requires reducing textures 2 notches https://youtu.be/xTwEGy6HHKo?t=351
Deathloop https://youtu.be/lu_XHyO-6zY?t=918
Ghost Recon Breakpoint https://youtu.be/iUGppQVpXzU?t=529
Resident Evil 2 https://youtu.be/Aa-gsgRjMII?t=796
Talos Principle 2 https://youtu.be/K6FATQAuEwI?t=337
Spider Man Remastered https://youtu.be/vRVR_plVSlc?t=1060
Witcher 3 https://youtu.be/vRVR_plVSlc?t=1240

Horizon Forbidden West 3060 is faster than the 2080 Super despite the former usually competing with the 2070. Also 3060 has a better 1% low than 4060 and 4060Ti 8GB.

Resident Evil Village 3060TI/3070 tanks at 4K and is slower than the 3060/6700XT when ray tracing:

Company Of Heroes 3060 has a higher minimum than the 3070TI:

10GB / 12GB

Plague Tale Requiem 3080 10GB tanks if you enable ray tracing, would be fast enough if it had more VRAM because if you stop moving, the framerate stabilizes to >60FPS https://youtu.be/7zjrMww3fAc?t=496
Hogwarts Legacy 4K + RT, 4060Ti 16GB is faster than 4070 12GB https://youtu.be/X-h_R488Mq8?t=191

Reasons why still shipping 8GB since 2014 isn't NV's fault.

It's the player's fault.
It's the reviewer's fault.
It's the developer's fault.
It's AMD's fault.
It's the game's fault.
It's the driver's fault.
It's a system configuration issue.
Wrong settings were tested.
Wrong area was tested.
Wrong games were tested.
4K is irrelevant.
Texture quality is irrelevant as long as it matches a console's.
Detail levels are irrelevant as long as they match a console's.
There's no reason a game should use more than 8GB, because a random forum user said so.
It's completely acceptable for the more expensive 3070/3070TI/3080 to turn down settings while the cheaper 3060/6700XT has no issue.
It's an anomaly.
It's a console port.
It's a conspiracy against NV.
8GB cards aren't meant for 4K / 1440p / 1080p / 720p gaming.
It's completely acceptable to disable ray tracing on NV while AMD has no issue.
Polls, hardware market share, and game title count are evidence 8GB is enough, but are totally ignored when they don't suit the ray tracing agenda.

According to some people here, 8GB is neeeevaaaaah NV's fault and objective evidence "doesn't count" because of reasons(tm). If you have others please let me know and I'll add them to the list. Cheers!

poke01 · Mar 13, 2025

igor_kavinski said:
View attachment 119786

Turd of a game if you can't enjoy the highest settings even with a 4090.

Sad thing it ran so smoothly before the update

igor_kavinski · Mar 13, 2025

poke01 said:
Sad thing it ran so smoothly before the update

I think the gold standard for gaming engines is still ID Software's after all these years. They strike an excellent balance between speed and pushing the graphics quality envelope. Even if their engine is hard on contemporary cards, one or two gens later, the same engine delivers 100+ fps at max settings. Seems they have some secret recipe that Carmack discovered long ago that allows the engine to scale up automatically with more CPU/GPU horsepower and which to this day is being used by them as a trade secret.

SolidQ · Mar 13, 2025

igor_kavinski said:
I think the gold standard for gaming engines is still ID Software's after all these years

Same. Engine just running fine. Even in RT mode people with low cards can play at 60+ fps.

igor_kavinski said:
Seems they have some secret recipe that Carmack discovered long ago

I'm assume it's something connected with OpenGL/Vulcan

Ranulf · Mar 14, 2025

Eh, I'm not surprised. Let's just say I'm not impressed by the KCD devs for numerous reasons. The last thing they really need to be working on for that game is any upscaling tech or ray tracing. The reported bugs and features left out that were in the first game should be a priority. The engine is fine and runs on older hardware now very well and the game looks good.

MrTeal · Mar 14, 2025

poke01 said:
Sad thing it ran so smoothly before the update

Uncle Jensen is just making sure that 5070 buyers are getting the same experience as 4090 owners.

marees · Mar 18, 2025

The overall overview shows that there are still games that run perfectly with 8 GB, but they are a dying breed. Anyone who wants to use ray tracing will definitely overtax an 8 GB graphics card – not because of the processing power required, but because of the memory requirements. The frame rate differences are gigantic and even produce interesting results in the "RTX 4060 Ti 16GB beats RTX 5070"

Anyone who has been using an 8 GB graphics card for years knows its peculiarities and doesn't need to replace it based on the results. However, the often-read statement that 8 GB is sufficient in Full HD has been refuted forever by this test. Anyone who doesn't manually reduce the details will experience either stuttering or texture mush, which the game automatically serves up in an attempt to save the frame rate. It should not go unmentioned that, despite our demanding test scenarios, we still show a best-case scenario. Typical gaming PCs have various programs running in the background that take up additional graphics memory and thus exacerbate the problems described. In addition, the number of games that are critical with 8 GB is significantly larger than the 35 benchmarks shown here, which represent a cross-section.

8 vs. 16 GByte VRAM im Test: Deutlicher Unterschied bei Geforce-Grafikkarten

Detail-Auswertung und Fazit

www-pcgameshardware-de.translate.goog

Ranulf · Mar 18, 2025

marees said:
Typical gaming PCs have various programs running in the background that take up additional graphics memory and thus exacerbate the problems described. In addition, the number of games that are critical with 8 GB is significantly larger than the 35 benchmarks shown here, which represent a cross-section.

A good point that is often missed or just not outright stated explicitly. Windows usually wants 1GB of vram for itself in a desktop scenario. A 4GB card is really 3GB for games. A 12GB card is really 11GB etc..

SolidQ · Mar 18, 2025

Assasin Creed Shadow
1440p another game want strong Videocard

Vram

SolidQ · Mar 20, 2025

8K RT RTX 5090.
Rip vram

maddie · Mar 20, 2025

SolidQ said:
8K RT RTX 5090.
Rip vram

Looking very ordinary.

Mopetar · Mar 20, 2025

maddie said:
Looking very ordinary.

Yeah, but there's 4x the ordinary that you can get with 4K.

Tup3x · Mar 20, 2025

Maxed out Control after the update with ray tracing (ultra preset for rt). I was wondering why textures didn't load properly and why it ran like crap.

Golgatha · Mar 21, 2025

Honest question here. For lower end video cards, will the amount of VRAM not matter, or at least not matter as much, in the future? Looking at the recently released spec for PCIe 7.0, the bandwidth for a x16 slot will be 512GB/s and Direct Storage is a thing. The 4070 12GB only has 504GB/s of memory bandwidth. Thinking further though, I guess you'd be limited by the speed of your SSD, but it might be a nice use case for a SLC 8GB or 16GB module connected directly to the video card; much like the RAM upgrades of olden days.

https://videocardz.com/newz/pci-express-7-0-final-specs-draft-released-set-to-double-pcie-6-0-data-rate

Thunder 57 · Mar 21, 2025

Golgatha said:
Honest question here. For lower end video cards, will the amount of VRAM not matter in the future? Looking at the recently released spec for PCIe 7.0, the bandwidth for a x16 slot will be 512GB/s and Direct Storage is a thing. The 4070 12GB only has 504GB/s of memory bandwidth. Thinking further though, I guess you'd be limited by the speed of your SSD, but it might be a nice use case for a SLC 8GB or 16GB module connected directly to the video card; much like the RAM upgrades of olden days.

PCIe 6 (let alone 7) won't make its way to client for years.

Golgatha · Mar 21, 2025

Thunder 57 said:
PCIe 6 (let alone 7) won't make its way to client for years.

Right, it took about 3 years to get the first PCIe 5.0 video cards, and (IMO) first viable PCIe 5.0 SSDs; aka a SSD that doesn't need a heatpipe and/or active cooling to run without throttling. So, the more specific question is say 6-10 years from now, will Direct Storage largely alleviate the need for more VRAM on video cards?

Edit: Thinking about this more and even though I despise proprietary solutions, a 16x video card could be split between an 8x interface for the GPU and an 8x interface for a SSD or proprietary memory upgrade module. Maybe even a non-proprietary solution of dual 4x NVME drives in some sort of dual channel configuration?

igor_kavinski · Mar 21, 2025

We (consumers) should see PCIe 6.0 with Zen 6/Nova Lake and PCIe 7.0 by 2031.

igor_kavinski · Mar 21, 2025

Golgatha said:
So, the more specific question is say 6-10 years from now, will Direct Storage largely alleviate the need for more VRAM on video cards?

Not sure how much VRAM writing is done in gaming workloads. If it's a lot, we would need expensive SSDs with higher TBW ratings.

Golgatha · Mar 21, 2025

igor_kavinski said:
Not sure how much VRAM writing is done in gaming workloads. If it's a lot, we would need expensive SSDs with higher TBW ratings.

Most Direct Storage is read operations, but for this I would envision a small but really fast purely SLC cache module; this would give you fast read and write + higher TBW. I'm thinking 1 or 2 Intel Optane type modules for VRAM supplementation directly on the video card as probably the best solution here.

Anecdotal comment - I still use a 16GB Intel Optane drive in an external enclosure to make Windows 10 or 11 installation media. It's a much faster and reliable solution than a regular USB drive, and there's plenty of space left over currently for a drivers and programs installation folder on the same drive. Just install the OS and then immediately access the drive to install drivers and a few programs. Doing it this way and using Rufus to automatically get past all the privacy and login making questions makes the whole process take like 30 minutes. I definitely don't miss the days of booting from a floppy drive and then installing from optical media.

igor_kavinski · Mar 21, 2025

Golgatha said:
Anecdotal comment - I still use a 16GB Intel Optane drive in an external enclosure to make Windows 10 or 11 installation media.

Which external enclosure please? I had two and both crapped out with the 64GB Optane drive I snagged for $50 used (maybe it pulls too much current or gets too hot).

Also, turn the Optane drive into a Ventoy drive. Then just drop ISO and voila! I can't believe it's so simple!

Thunder 57 · Mar 21, 2025

igor_kavinski said:
We (consumers) should see PCIe 6.0 with Zen 6/Nova Lake and PCIe 7.0 by 2031.

No doubt we will see PCIe 6 with Zen 6 with DDR6 launched on 6/6.

Golgatha · Mar 21, 2025

Thunder 57 said:
No doubt we will see PCIe 6 with Zen 6 with DDR6 launched on 6/6.

It'll be a (666) Beast of a system!

Golgatha · Mar 21, 2025

igor_kavinski said:
Which external enclosure please? I had two and both crapped out with the 64GB Optane drive I snagged for $50 used (maybe it pulls too much current or gets too hot).

Also, turn the Optane drive into a Ventoy drive. Then just drop ISO and voila! I can't believe it's so simple!

Been using these for years. Bought 2 different colors so I know which drive is which (I have a 2TB for backups in the other enclosure).

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B097H7JZVG

blckgrffn · Mar 21, 2025

Golgatha said:
Been using these for years. Bought 2 different colors so I know which drive is which (I have a 2TB for backups in the other enclosure).

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B097H7JZVG

Actually I bought the same for NVME drive data removal, etc. Has worked every time I needed it to.

Golgatha · Mar 21, 2025

blckgrffn said:
Actually I bought the same for NVME drive data removal, etc. Has worked every time I needed it to.

Yes, I've installed and uninstalled NVME drives dozens of times from these enclosures. The installation screw is metal and the mounting nut is brass. A lot of these external enclosures have rubber or plastic installation hardware and they're good for less than a handful of swaps. I would say I've swapped drives out of these dozens of times and they still work great.

Very fast for swapping during a laptop image for example. You image the laptop drive to the drive in the external enclosure and then the enclosure becomes a nice storage spot for the drive coming out of the laptop. Once the laptop is verified working correctly, that's the time you use diskpart to prep the drive in the enclosure for something else. My most recent usage was consolidating 2x2TB NVME to a single 4TB drive (#2 setup in my signature), so the same process on my desktop as compared to a laptop....annnnd to tie all this together, the reason I consolidated drives is because NVME #3 shares bandwidth with the bottom PCIe 16x slot where the 3050 6GB now resides, AND 6GB OF VRAM IS NOT ENOUGH (UNLESS YOU'RE USING IT FOR DEDICATED PHYSX, THEN IT'S ENOUGH)!!!

MrPickins · Friday at 2:19 PM

Golgatha said:
Most Direct Storage is read operations, but for this I would envision a small but really fast purely SLC cache module; this would give you fast read and write + higher TBW. I'm thinking 1 or 2 Intel Optane type modules for VRAM supplementation directly on the video card as probably the best solution here.

If you're going so far as all that, why not just add another ram socket on the card or motherboard for additional vram? It would be worlds faster for both reads and writes, both in bandwidth and latency.

Edit: I was thinking user-upgradable. If you're thinking soldered on, I could see that. Just a large SLC level of cache for the GPU.

8GB VRAM not enough (and 10 / 12)

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