Why VRAM Is So Important For Gaming: 4GB vs. 8GB

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00:00 - Welcome to Hardware Unboxed
00:24 - Ad Spot
01:04 - A brief description of VRAM
06:13 - Baldur’s Gate 3
06:51 - Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
07:32 - Dying Light 2: Stay Human
08:01 - Forza Motorsport
08:17 - Immortals of Aveum
09:08 - Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart
09:51 - Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered
10:23 - Investigating Texture Presets
10:36 - Assassin’s Creed Mirage [Visual Comparison]
12:51 - Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden
14:02 - Hogwarts Legacy [Visual Comparison]
17:47 - Skull and Bones
18:30 - Star Wars: Jedi Survivor [Visual Comparison]
19:43 - The Last of Us Part I [Visual Comparison]
22:10 - Total War: Warhammer III [Visual Comparison]
23:49 - Final Thoughts

Why VRAM’s So Important For Gaming: 4GB vs. 8GB

Disclaimer: Any pricing information shown or mentioned in this video was accurate at the time of video production, and may have since changed

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Outro music by David Vonk/DaJaVo

[JarrodsTech]

It's a good thing you can always just download more VRAM.

[AthanImmortal]

I never understood why Hardware unboxed caught so much flak originally for suggesting that GPU VRAM was not moving on as fast as the gaming industry was, and that 8GB cards were going to age a lot faster. Instead customers should be angry that Nvidia was selling us the same 8GB of VRAM on the 1070 (2016), 2070 (2018) and 3070 (2020), and STILL wanted $400 for an 8GB card in 2023 in the form of the 4060Ti.

Go back 4 years from 2016 and in 2012 you have the 670 with 2GB. Memory *quadrupled* in the same time frame in the mid range. Yet everyone was barking "game devs need to optimise", sure if you want graphics to stay the same, why don't they optimise for 2GB then? Because at some point we need to up and move on.

The fact is that someone that bought a 1070 in 2016 can still play at the same level they did 7 years ago, but at the point they run into VRAM issues, those same issues are going to affect someone that bought a 3070 just 3 years ago, regardless of the difference in 3d capability between the cards.

I'm glad to see HUB still championing this point.

[Phil_]

First 8GB card was the Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290X in Nov. 2014.

[crazylocha]

Surprised me how well Steve put things and it kept becoming interesting at every level. Great piece 👍 (Thx Steve)

[chriscastillo]

I love these VRAM videos! No one talks about this or let alone testing on it.. thanks for the vids!❤

[andrexskin]

I guess that we should already look up on a 8GB vs 12GB of "similar cards".
An example would be the 3060 12GB vs 3060Ti 8GB, trying to spot if there are already cases where the raster performance from 3060Ti isn't enough to balance the quality a 3060 12GB would achieve with higher texture quality

[ojassarup]

Would be interested in seeing 8v12v16 GB VRAM comparisons too!

[Ale-chxx]

@24:29 Correction: The first Radeon card that had 8gb was the Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290X 8gb released on Nov 7th, 2014.

[pvtcmyers]

Thanks for creating the video for this and for taking a different look at the vram issue.

[sergiopablo]

I don't know why, but this is the only channel where I click "like" even before the videos start. It may be the absolute lack of clickbait on the titles, how useful all of them are, or how relaxing it is to watch someone speak without yelling or jumping around.

[BUDA]

also some of those cross the 16 GB of RAM limit because of the low VRAM capacity, so... people with 4GB cards, are likely to have 16GB of ram... so it will tank even more

[Pandemonium]

Next up, 24gb of vram and unreal 5 enginre still has traversal stutter 😅

[rks]

Yes, textures makes all the difference. Back in a day of my GTX1080 I'd always try to pump up textures as high as I can, while lowering everything else as much as reasonably practicable. Textures make all the difference.

[DJackson]

I can't imagine getting any less than 12 GB these days. Granted most of what I play are older games or low spec games but it still let's me play newer software at med/high settings comfortably. A 4GB card should be like $99 usd at this point as it's gonna age like milk.

[Code_String]

It sucks that some nice GPU chips will be held back by the VRAM buffer x: .The 12Gb of my 6800m has been surprisingly more useful than I could have thought.

[CharcharoExplorer]

The R9 390 was not pointless. Modders had a blast with texture mods and LOD/Model mods with it.

[theslimeylimey]

Sitting here still happy with my "ancient" 1080TI with 11gig of ram and "only" 484 GB/s memory bandwidth.

[Владимир-язш]

Great job with testing Steve, thanks for an update on VRAM matter.

[xkxk]

some notable past examples are 980 ti (6gb) vs fury x (4gb) and 780 ti (3gb) vs 290x (4gb). vram helped push out more performance for those cards

[gamingoptimized]

Well, I know I made a mistake when I didn't spend 50 dollars more for a GTX 1060 6GB... (I have the 3GB one...)