8GB VRAM not enough (and 10 / 12)

[BFG10K]

This thread was started in mid 2021 and is being retired/locked. As the OP is no longer active, or updating and maintaining it.

Mod DAPUNISHER

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.

Spoiler

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

Spoiler

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

Spoiler

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.

Spoiler

1. It's the player's fault.
2. It's the reviewer's fault.
3. It's the developer's fault.
4. It's AMD's fault.
5. It's the game's fault.
6. It's the driver's fault.
7. It's a system configuration issue.
8. Wrong settings were tested.
9. Wrong area was tested.
10. Wrong games were tested.
11. 4K is irrelevant.
12. Texture quality is irrelevant as long as it matches a console's.
13. Detail levels are irrelevant as long as they match a console's.
14. There's no reason a game should use more than 8GB, because a random forum user said so.
15. It's completely acceptable for the more expensive 3070/3070TI/3080 to turn down settings while the cheaper 3060/6700XT has no issue.
16. It's an anomaly.
17. It's a console port.
18. It's a conspiracy against NV.
19. 8GB cards aren't meant for 4K / 1440p / 1080p / 720p gaming.
20. It's completely acceptable to disable ray tracing on NV while AMD has no issue.
21. 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!

 

[Aapje]

Nah. The question will be is the product fit for purpose.

You are ignoring that engineering often consists of trade-offs. Just because the trade-off is not to your liking, doesn't mean that you get to call the product defective.

Take a simple example of a GPU with an underpowered cooling solution that thermally throttles, either by design or through defect.

If it is a 1U design or a cheaper model with a cheap cooler, that can be a perfectly valid choice. Or it can be designed to not run at maximum performance all the time. It's a perfectly viable use case put the chip in a device that is expected to be fast in peak loads, but cannot sustain that speed under permanent load.

The 13900 KS is meant for that, just like PCIe 4/5.0 NVMe storage is typically not cooled to a level that can sustain permanently high load without throttling. And that is fine, because most people do not often put their NVMe drives under permanently high load.

Anything like that would be considered unfit for purpose and in the UK you have 6 months to inform the retailer that you are rejecting it for those reasons. They get 1 chance to repair / replace the item and if the new or repaired item is unfit you can get a full refund. After the 6 month window you can get a pro-rata refund to account for your use of the product.

I'm not an expert on UK law, but my expectation is that, if their law is like that of most other countries, you will fail to win a court case on the matter.

I think it is reasonable for a more expensive product of a generation to out perform cheaper products in the same generation pretty much across the board.

Did the company actually make that promise or is it something that you consider reasonable? Because if it's only the latter, the company has a myriad of options to argue that your expectation is silly.

There is absolutely no reason why price should reflect a general level of usefulness or quality, rather than have the product optimize for something different, even if it is not just at the expense of the price, but also some other features.

Is Maurizio Cattelan's golden toilet a scam because it is way more expensive than a regular toilet, but worse in at least one way, because metal is less comfortable to your butt cheeks than plastic? No, because the art piece optimizes for a very shallow form of art appreciation, not for being the optimal toilet.

Is a supercar a scam because it can carry much less than a cheap van and is much less comfortable to drive over bad roads? No, because the supercar is designed to be very fast, at the expense of capacity and comfort. The extra money goes into carbon fiber and other things that make the car light and stiff, not into making it bigger or more comfortable. And that is fine. As a buyer, you are expected to figure out what you want and whether the product fits your needs, not just go 'higher price, needs to be better in all ways.'

 

[Ranulf]

You are not getting short changed at all. The 3060ti is healthily consistently faster. Equal vram amount, has nothing to do with anything. Especially if you also take mesh shaders in account, the 3060ti is even faster nowadays (Alan Wake 2).

Yes, you are. The prices keep going up and you're not getting a better performance value. Its one thing if the price was around the same from 6+ years ago and you could sort of justify upgrading every 2-3 years. Now the prices almost double or did double, ram stays the same and we now have tech that will want more ram as it tries to compensate for the chips not able to run 60fps at HD/2k/4k resolutions. I'll grant you that ram does not always matter but it clearly does these days and it kills long term value for most of these cards... for a PC part that historically has had the highest depreciation in your computer.

 

[DeathReborn]

I'm wondering how many more people will explain the topic to psolord before this thread is done.

(I'm not faulting them, I've tried twice!)

Maybe if both sides weren't hypocrites cherry picking to support their particular soapbox. This thread is a joke, has been for a while. What could have a been a informative, useful thread has become no better than politics.

 

[igor_kavinski]

If there is one conclusion that can be drawn from this thread, it's that psolord has all the potential in the world to be a most excellent, investor friendly, profit focused CEO. We should thank him for not assuming that role and ripping off the public at large.

 

[igor_kavinski]

What could have a been a informative, useful thread has become no better than politics.

So a $400 8GB card is OK to put on the market?

 

[MrTeal]

So a $400 8GB card is OK to put on the market?

We should definitely have someone research the price of GDDR on Digikey so we can make an informed decision of what amount of RAM is appropriate on a $400 card.

 

[dr1337]

Well, he didn’t say the 4080 was ridiculous. It’s a nicely balanced card, imo. If just a bit expensive for my tastes. Over $1k my eyes glaze over on this front.

Its a nicely balanced card but its price makes your eyes glaze over? does not compute.

Someone giving over $1k to the company raising prices and gouging for VRAM while also calling their actions unethical is the definition of irony.

 

[DeathReborn]

So a $400 8GB card is OK to put on the market?

No, but that's a pricing issue, not a VRAM issue isn't it. At what price does an 8GB card become not an issue to you? I wouldn't pay more than $200 personally but I game at 1440 & 4K and I buy appropriate hardware for the Settings/Resolution/FPS I want to play at.

 

[blckgrffn]

Its a nicely balanced card but its price makes your eyes glaze over? does not compute.

I don’t get it.

I can think a Porsche 911 is an amazing machine but not ever justify a $100k+++ car for myself. What’s hard to comprehend about that? The one I just read about in C&D sounds amazing and perfect but is almost $300k. That doesn’t make it bad or evil or anything.

I think the 4080 is a solid card, it has enough GPU core and memory to make sense. It costs more than I can justify spending on myself for playing games.

 

[igor_kavinski]

At what price does an 8GB card become not an issue to you? I wouldn't pay more than $200 personally

I feel that's a fair price. At that price, I wouldn't feel sad that my card was gimped with too little RAM because I made a conscious decision to save money and prioritize my finances over my quality of entertainment. At $400, I'm paying enough that I expect my card to not suck at reasonably good settings. I could turn some crazy settings off like soft shadows etc. RTX off too if that's what's needed for a better, more bearable framerate.

What will piss me off is if I see some other similarly priced card with more VRAM doing better in games. That's when I will feel that I've been tricked with the short end of the stick. nGreedia pretends to price its cards like AMD doesn't exist. The point of this thread is to raise awareness to not to pay more for less. It's to show readers that more VRAM can often prolong the useful life of their card and save them money in the long run. They can keep using their card for longer, all the while waiting for that next great card where it again makes sense to part with serious money.

And then the card gets passed onto some more price conscious user through 2nd hand sale. It will serve that user for a good while too if it has a good amount of VRAM. There's less chance of that card becoming useless for those who can't afford anything more in a used state. Those less privileged people deserve good things to happen to them too. An 8GB card is more at risk of being thrown in the landfills before it's truly worn out. What if games start getting so texture heavy that reducing texture quality makes them so ugly that no one wants to deal with the ugly graphics of an 8GB card? That will lead to a massive dumping of 8GB cards well before their life is over. There is no reason to defend a selfish short sighted company that only cares about maximizing its bottom line by screwing people out of their hard earned money. Calling out bad behavior and bad practices is the only way to end them, short of making them illegal by law.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I think the 4080 is a solid card, it has enough GPU core and memory to make sense.

I would rather the 4080 was the top card with 24GB VRAM at $1000 and 4090 did not exist. I don't want any card going over $1000 and then causing the cheaper cards to get artificially constrained to make the expensive card look better.

 

[dr1337]

I can think a Porsche 911 is an amazing machine but not ever justify a $100k+++ car for myself. What’s hard to comprehend about that?

I'd rather buy a used porche, or an M3.

Frankly there is a ton I could say about the state of cars and other hobbyist markets right now, but its a fact that a 911 is a machine that sells not based on performance alone but branding as well. People buy base model 911s because of Nurburgring GT3 times and think its just as fast, and maybe this psychology is what applies to people buying Nvidia GPUs.

A 4080 is a fast card but when Intel and AMD can sell more VRAM for less, and Nvidia's margins are higher than ever, its obviously not set to a realistic price point for sales purposes and instead its about profit. It's all price gouged.

 

[SolidQ]

3060ti seems very weak for Avatar

AMD seems got boost in overdrive mode Cyberpunk 2.1

Spoiler

2.0

2.1

AMD FSR 3 Frame Generation in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora unterstützt FSR 3 Frame Generation und AMDs künstliche Bilder zeigen in dem Spiel massive Verbesserungen.

www.computerbase.de

VSync on or off no longer matters - and VRR works​

Frame generation in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora suddenly doesn't matter whether VSync is on or off. Two months ago VSync had to be active, otherwise FSR FG would stutter horribly. In Avatar, however, image synchronization no longer makes a noticeable difference. If the monitor supports variable refresh rates, there is no need to stick to exactly that limit. VRR now works properly. The frame rate can easily fluctuate while playing as long as the minimum frame rate required for a smooth image is exceeded.

Two months later, AMD's frame generation in Avatar can be described as absolutely equal to Nvidia's DLSS frame generation. While there are still slight differences between the two technologies with various advantages and disadvantages, the end result is surprisingly the same. Performance, image quality, latency, general functionality: FSR FG performs comparable to DLSS FG everywhere. So far only in one title, but others at this level are welcome to follow.

 

[MrTeal]

Ah finally, we've arrived at car analogies. The thread is officially over.

My take, VRAM is like brakes. Usually they don't matter, and you don't reach the limit of braking performance. You can have a beige Camry with mediocre brakes and it's all fine, you enjoy your commute and reliability. Car only cost you $20k anyway. But maybe now you bought a Lexus LC500 for $100k, and it has the same brakes as the Camry. Still a beautiful car, and all that power under the hood. Really you don't even notice, it's not like you're emergency stopping for 200kph or taking it to the track. Sure that BMW M5 over there has those big beautiful Brembo calipers, but who needs em.
Until you do need them, and when brakes fade out things go terribly bad. I guess you're driving it the wrong way, just if you get to a really twisty road slow down a bit and brake early, like the Camry. Ignore the Beemer and his smug ahole driver flying past. Don't worry about what could have been if Toyota just just slapped some bigger discs and calipers on there.

 

[blckgrffn]

I'd rather buy a used porche, or an M3.

Frankly there is a ton I could say about the state of cars and other hobbyist markets right now, but its a fact that a 911 is a machine that sells not based on performance alone but branding as well. People buy base model 911s because of Nurburgring GT3 times and think its just as fast, and maybe this psychology is what applies to people buying Nvidia GPUs.

A 4080 is a fast card but when Intel and AMD can sell more VRAM for less, and Nvidia's margins are higher than ever, its obviously not set to a realistic price point for sales purposes and instead its about profit. It's all price gouged.

And in a similar vein, I will, in a future when a new round of GPU releases brings more performance for the dollar (ha), consider the 4080 as a used card while I would never* consider a 3070ti.

@igor_kavinski there is no price ceiling on these things, and so long as people are willing to accept and indeed shell out their hard earned money on 8GB $450 new cards and 12GB on nearly $1k cards, then that's what nvidia is going to do. I am not going to tell you to like it though.

nvidia has successfully, and may it be noted to my chagrin, tested the market and found the sales volumes at these new price points quite palatable to their own tastes.

*I am a sucker. If its cheap enough I will buy one. For science.

 

[DeathReborn]

Ah finally, we've arrived at car analogies. The thread is officially over.

My take, VRAM is like brakes. Usually they don't matter, and you don't reach the limit of braking performance. You can have a beige Camry with mediocre brakes and it's all fine, you enjoy your commute and reliability. Car only cost you $20k anyway. But maybe now you bought a Lexus LC500 for $100k, and it has the same brakes as the Camry. Still a beautiful car, and all that power under the hood. Really you don't even notice, it's not like you're emergency stopping for 200kph or taking it to the track. Sure that BMW M5 over there has those big beautiful Brembo calipers, but who needs em.
Until you do need them, and when brakes fade out things go terribly bad. I guess you're driving it the wrong way, just if you get to a really twisty road slow down a bit and brake early, like the Camry. Ignore the Beemer and his smug ahole driver flying past. Don't worry about what could have been if Toyota just just slapped some bigger discs and calipers on there.

I might have missed it but I believe it dies when Godwin's law is invoked, cars are just a prelude.

 

[BFG10K]

No, but that's a pricing issue, not a VRAM issue isn't it.

Yep, if the 3080/3070TI/3070 were cheaper than the 3060, I don't think anyone would have a problem with them.

But they're more expensive, yet the cheaper 3060 outruns them in several situations. And some people on the internet actually defend this with various mental gymnastics.

"Oh...oh...oh...you just turn down the texture settings on those more expensive cards, no big deal!"

#15 It's completely acceptable for the more expensive 3070/3070TI/3080 to turn down settings while the cheaper 3060/6700XT has no issue.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I might have missed it but I believe it dies when Godwin's law is invoked, cars are just a prelude.

I won't drag politics into the tech forums. Hence I will make this succinct. Godwin himself gave us his blessing to use the comparison a few years back due to the present circumstances. That suspends his law until further notice.

Therefore I vote to codify and adopt Teal's Law. Which states in essence - Whenever a car analogy is invoked in a PC tech discussion, the thread is over.

We should probably conduct a vote at some point. I think it would be ratified overwhelmingly.

The pop in on that 3060ti in the Smurfs in space game is atrocious. I am not certain that particular card is not part of the issue though. My evga model never got close to 80C outside of the hotspot temp, and I don't think that is what afterburner is displaying in that vid.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

This thread has a link asking me to show ignored content. My answer -

I can read the responses and get the full story. I mean it's the same mantra over and over cluttered with screenshots and vids that only serve to clutter up the thread. I would have otherwise bailed on this thread entirely.

 

[BFG10K]

Guys, guys, here's proof dual-core CPU, 2GB system RAM, and integrated graphics are all you need in 2023. You don't even need a dGPU!

And guys, a 1GB HDD is absolutely fine in 2023 - you can fit four of these games on it!

Clearly this game uses "correct settings". Next I'll post links to 37 screenshots and 14 videos on my "non-monetized" youtube channel "proving" it.

OMG guys, I can' t believe how awesome I am!

 

[MrTeal]

Guys, guys, here's proof dual-core CPU, 2GB system RAM, and integrated graphics are all you need in 2023. You don't even need a dGPU!

And guys, a 1GB HDD is absolutely fine in 2023 - you can fit four of these games on it!


Clearly this game uses "correct settings". Next I'll post links to 37 screenshots and 14 videos on my "non-monetized" youtube channel "proving" it.

OMG guys, I can' t believe how awesome I am!

Pfft, if you're some PCMR guy. The last game I bought and played on Steam didn't need no elitist dual core.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I'm all for less is more but our friend keeps arguing in favor of more for less

 

[Mopetar]

Looks like he finally got tired of getting dunked on and took his 8GB ball and went home.

With the kind of aggressive hard sell attitude he should really look into hawking time shares.

See you all seven or eight years from now in the 16 GB vs. 32 GB thread.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Looks like he finally got tired of getting dunked on and took his 8GB ball and went home.

Never underestimate him! He might be furiously playing and recording gameplay videos as we speak! Gotta admire the guy's passion.

 

[psolord]

Those GameGPU charts are horrendous. Mixing DLAA, DLSS, Native all on the same chart makes it very difficult to compare like for like and it does not even look as though they test NV GPUs at native native, their native is DLAA which typically has barely any FPS cost but not always. Also it seems to be sorted by 4K FPS making it even harder to parse so I am not going to use that chart.

You can visit their website and sort out the data however you want. I just uploaded the whole content, to show how 1080p/1440p/4k scaled. In Alan Wake II, there is only DLAA option when you select native I think.

I will use the much easier to parse one from TPU who I also rank more highly in terms of methodology.

As you can see the 4060Ti is far faster than the 4070Ti at this 4K native + RT setting. From the 1440p results you would expect the 4070Ti with a sensible memory and bus config to remain between the 3090Ti and 3090 but you crank it to 4K and it falls off a cliff.

This is the kind of example, that grinds my gears. Do you really want me to take this seriously? Any of you do? For real? You are showing a graph where everything is unplayable and you conclude how important more vram is?

And yes, these are corner cases, at the moment, the problem with corner cases like Doom Eternal for the 3070 is that as time goes on they tend to stop being corner cases and become the norm, and we are seeing more and more cases where 8GB is insufficient for the amount of GPU power on tap and we are seeing it with 12GB and in the future 16GB and more will be the new low end.

For serial upgraders it is less of an issue, for those who like to buy solid hardware and run it until it dies it is an issue because often the sort of settings you need to reduce when you are VRAM limited have far more IQ impact than the ones you need to turn down / off when GPU limited. Also there will come a point where no amount of tuning will make a game fit in a limited VRAM buffer where as usually you can keep turning GPU compute settings down to get something playable.

My main beef with this thread, is that most of you, ignore the gpu power/vram ratio significance. When the dataset will have grown to the point that it will be causing real problems for 8GB cards, it will create equal problems to higher vram cards. Show me playable examples please.

So far there has been one true real life example, of vram having a significant impact in real life use. 4060ti 16GB at 4k running 60fps, 4060ti 8GB running 30fps. Even so, none of these cards are 4k cards, the 4060ti also has the option to use dlss and should, as it works great, the higher the res. This one game, for the 4060ti 16GB, is nothing compared to the vast majority of games, for which you would need a stronger card for 4K anyway.

The other issue that none of these charts show and where video reviews are a benefit is how much texture swapping or LOD issues are occurring when the engine runs out of VRAM. For some engines rather than tank the frame rate they just make the game look terrible so the bar chart at least looks okay. Something that happened in Hogwarts Legacy for the 8GB 3070. Frame rates were fine, texture swapping made it look like garbage. The 16GB pro model however had fine frame rates and the IQ was also great.

At what res and what settings? If you crank everything to gtfo settings, of course it would. Is there a solution to make it run better though? I do have a run of Hogwarts, on the 3060ti, since this is the one I got, at 4k/dlss performance, which essentially renders at 1080p internally, but still 4k dlss performance is not the same as straight 1080p. Dlss does use some of the cards power budget. Even so, the game run fine for the caliber of the card.

And I also have the same run, on a rx6600. 1080p straight at high this time. I don't see the problem here either. Each card did what was expected.

And I even run it on a freagin GTX 970, yes at its correct settings, because this is what settings are for and still was not downright ugly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EAESENYxk8