It's not about the VRAM!

You might have noticed that there’s a new angry mob out there. They’ve gathered up all their best pitchforks and torches gone to war against GPUs without, in their opinion, enough VRAM. It feels like just yesterday we were all totally happy with 4gb GPUs. And then for like 2 days 8gb was the minimum, and now the mob is DEMANDING that GPUs with 8 or less GBs are WORTHLESS GARBAGE. Does the mob have a point? Or are they worried about nothing like usual? Well let’s find out today, shall we?

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- MUSIC CREDITS -
Intro: Captive Portal - Intro For A Nonexisting Video Game
Outro: RoccoW - Chipho instrumental

- CHAPTERS -
00:00 WE DEMAND MORE VRAM!
00:42 All this VRAM talk
01:47 Where did this idea come from?
03:12 Is 8gb enough? (12gb 3060 vs 8gb 3060 ti)
04:27 LOTR: Gollum
06:32 Hogwarts Legacy
08:04 Uncharted
09:46 A Plague Tale Requiem
11:31 The Last of Us
13:45 Conclusion
15:49 Sorry for ranting

#gpu #pcgaming #vram

[mikedonalds]

In the elitist sphere of PC gaming, it's either maximum settings or nothing. Once in a blue moon when there are no new releases to cover, tech channels do their token videos on how lower settings can still look good, and then when the new hardware releases come along, they carry on pretending that anything less than ultra settings isn't worth getting out of bed for. Back in the real world, we just turn the textures down a bit and live without VRAM-heavy things like ray tracing, and then we enjoy playing the damn game because we didn't buy our gaming PCs to run art exhibitions in our own homes.

[MarshallRawR]

What's scary is that the norm of "8GB is new minimum" has been set in motion now. I have a feeling it might happen more and more as developers will use that in order to spend less time optimizing. Less and less backlash with time, more and more recommendation for higher VRAM cards. Basically, this will become the new DLSS/FSR that is already the reality. Less optimization, less FPS but hey! Just toggle FSR right?!

[MBoosted]

I think the real argument is that people who buy cards at $400-$600 expect to max out modern games at 1080p for several years after their purchase. With the 30/40 series cards the limited vram amounts make people really mad that they would have to spend $400-$600 to not even max games out at 1080p.

This is the way I feel about the situation, anyway. When I bought my 1070 I played everything at max at 1080p and I bought that card for $360.

[IcebergTech]

Good lord, you *bought* Gollum?
Talk about taking one for the team!

[caligolagg]

its not how big your vram is its how you use it.

[firisrozley]

The moment they put 12GB VRAM as a minimum requirement to play that PC game is the moment I stopped buying modern PC games & just straight to emulating PS2/GC & Wii/OG Xbox games.

[poppasteve]

Us old guys remember when a game had to work when you bought it, because it was on a CDrom or DVD and patches were a real pain. Now, games are released in basically an unfinished state, and you get a new patch or update every time you start it. Not cool. Makes everybody frustrated.

[floycewhite]

Steam survey says 81.45% use 8 GB or less of VRAM. Only 2.98% of gamers have a video card with more than 12 GB of VRAM. Therefore, 83.94% of the video cards sold that are over 8 GB, are not much above it, such as the RTX 3060 or RX 6700 XT. Please notice that 81.45 and 83.94 are essentially the same number. Gamers who had to get new video cards, laptops, or build new desktops in the last few years -- even those who had a little higher budget to work with -- kept pretty much the same outlook as they had with the computers they used before. Performance and features are great, but price rules.

[HDAD]

I just keep praying to gaming god that we don't go beyond 8GB for 1080p gaming in the coming years, it doesn't make sense honestly.

[nadiaezzarhouni]

Optimization plays a big difference between games and esports titles in particular

[voteDC]

Today I discovered that a Gigglebyte is an actual term for an unspecified but stupidly large amount of storage. You learn something new every day.

When it comes Hogwarts Legacy I can get a fairly steady 60fps on a Ryzen 3 1300X, GTX 970 (4GB or 3.5GB of vRAM depending on who you ask), and 8GB of RAM on my Media PC. Now to be fair that is with a lot of Low in the settings and use of the Balanced FSR 2.0 preset. The game still looks good though and runs well. People really just need to temper their expectations and their settings to the hardware.

[BrockObunger]

I think the overall takeaway from this is if you have 8gb vram rn then there is no need to worry. However, if you are upgrading for a gpu worth more than 300 USD, you should definitely be looking for at least 12gb because you obviously want the option to run on the highest settings on a new mid range plus GPU.

[jiggle_counter]

Unless you're knee deep in VRAM, jack every graphical setting to Ultra settings, only touching the hungriest VRAM eaters like Textures, Reflections, Tessellation, Shadows, and more recently Ray Tracing

But I guess that's the arguement being made, "I don't WANT to tamper and test, I just want Ultra preset! I bought the game, I want to use ALL the game!"

[roythunderplump]

Hundreds of highly rated PC games from 2000-2016 that can run on 4GB -8GB cards.

[SianaGearz]

I am surprised this LOTR Gollum game hadn't come out in like 2008. It feels so out of time today, with merely performance issues revealing when it's from.

[Jwhipification]

Thanks for revealing this to me. I've been debating on a gpu because of the vram talk. Seriously thanks man.

[kaisersoza]

MLID spoke about this recently.

Games development takes roughly 3 - 6 years to make.
6 years ago the top tier card was the 1080ti which had 11gb of vram..
Game developers assume that 6 years later 11gb vram will be the AVERAGE amount of vram at best! Once their game is completed

They couldn't predict that gpus are coming out today with 8gb..

[tomthomas]

I still remember Last of Us initial release version running at 1080p fsr quality (which basically at 720p) and it eats up 6-7gb vram 😂, 6gb vram for 720p textures is just absurd, i'm glad they managed to fixed the problem though

[jonathanellis]

Testers use ultra setting to benchmark, so you are showing to maximum potential performance of a product and to make sure you are testing on a level playing field. Most of the testers do say they wouldn't actually play at those settings depending on the hardware and game. It makes sense to test with the same setting to show scaling and the relative performance of each product.

Personally I normally set games to medium and then set texture quality to as high as my VRAM will allow, as that normally give great performance along with good image quality.

[Rayanaminge]

As someone who had a 1080, and graduated to a 3090, then popped a 980ti into my old system. I’ve discovered that yes, 8gb is pretty much the needed amount these days for high settings, but it’s more than that in my personal testing. It looks like it’s also the bandwidth of that RAM. The biggest issue with the 4060 is that they pulled the bandwidth back hard. The 8gb is fine.
You’re correct that there are way too many high profile games coming out that are poorly optimized. A well optimized game can use high bandwidth of 8gb just fine. That RAM isn’t processing the graphics, it’s just holding the data for the GPU itself. If that data is bloated and dirty, 8gb may not be enough, but I really think it’s that bandwidth bottleneck.

Good video and I’m glad that more people are willing to call these multi-million dollar games coming out poorly optimized.