4GB VRAM isn't cutting it anymore says AMD
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Mineria
Not a bad idea more in the likes of time demanding to get everything right.
Today that 680 will have it even worse, a 1050Ti is barely able to drag maxed out mods + ENB.
D1stRU3T0R
Tbh, a Fury X is still an OP card for 1080p144/240hz monitors and those under, especially for esport titles. 4GB is almost nowhere being fully utilised. I have a RX580 8GB, but tbh I was thinking about the 4GB one since I only have 900P (i bought it for 62 euro, and the 4GB one had the same price...).
All in all, IF you have under or 1080p, 4GB of vram is OKEYISH (IF you look at at least fury x and other high end GPU-s(no, not you GTX 970). (cmon let's not talk about skyrim mods and etc)
Welcome to AMD marketing btw
lukas_1987_dion
This is true, some games on ultra settings (especially textures settings) can use around 7-9GB+ of VRAM (I use 1440p monitor), modded Fallout 4, Skyrim SE, FFXV, GTAV with HD DLC even more, even when some games uses VRAM just for caching it's better and faster with less stuttering than caching on system RAM, I don't remember when I had stuttering in any games, unless it was broken port or drivers, wich is rare these days. New consoles will only make it worse for PC games/ports.. I predict 8GB VRAM as minimun pretty soon.. Unless you play on low setting ofc.
Edit, also Rise of The Tomb Raider on highest settings needs 6GB VRAM even for 1080p, when I had GTX 980 with 4GB VRAM it was stutter fiesta after like 15-30 minutes of gameplay, basically unplayable, this setting is hidden even if you choose highest as default, you can actually manually choose even higher setting for textures.
Another example would be HITMAN 2 on highest settings at 1440p.
Ricepudding
4gb Vram hasn't been enough for awhile,hopefully 8GB gets made the standard (or guess 6GB), I know some games use more than is needed to stop any issues with accessing the data from the drives. But find most modern games are using more than 4gb with many using between 6-8, the ones that fill use the full 11gb my card has.
Kinda like system Ram, 4gb just is not enough anymore, and need 8gb min, and for gaming on modern games think you need 12/16gb now otherwise you might start hitting caps. Didn't someone actually test the 970 recently and it was hitting Vram caps all the time and causing tons of performance issues due to that limit it had, games were hitting the slower 0.5gb and it just crushed performance.
Miss when i got my 7970 with 3gb for the time and that was considered insane, with the normal we will never fill that up haha.
Edit: That said with the new consoles both coming out the park with 16gb of VRAM this could change again on how much we need for modern games, I assume at least 12-14GB VRam is purely for gaming, i doubt the OS on there are using much more than 2-4gb of ram. Ps4 pro just uses the 1gb ddr3 for the system if im correct?
RzrTrek
I know racing games aren't known to be heavy, but at 1080p I'm still having a hard time to fill my 8gb vram half full.
Fender178
As far as Vram goes it depends on what you are playing with it and what settings you are playing with. I agree that 4GB cards are getting long in the tooth now a days just like using 8GB of system RAM in a PC. Now a days you might need at least 6GB of Vram at minimum and for those who like the eye candy probably need 8GB+. Just like with system RAM if you using a program like Google Chrome you are going to need more than 8GB and even more than 16GB thanks for that program being a huge RAM hog with a lot of tabs open.
dampflokfreund
6-8 GB is going to be the standard going into next generation games. But I don't think games will be unplayable on 4 GB cards, they might be fine at lower resolutions and settings. Cross gen games will still run with 2-3 GB cards because they are developed with the old consoles in mind, however next gen I expect a minimum requirement of 4 GB. Assuming you have a NVMe SSD. HDDs could significantly increase RAM and VRAM requirements.
IDTech is a weird case though, the texture pool streaming setting just regulates how much of a fixed streaming budget the engine has. There is actually zero differences in texture quality between high and ultra nightmare, so you can set that to Ultra and everything else to Ultra-Nightmare and you basically have Ultra Nightmare settings on a 6 GB card.
sbacchetta
There is 2 questions here. Do you need more than 4gb at 1080p today ? Not really. Should you buy a 4gb card today ? Personally, I would not, why ? A few years back, I bought a 6950 1gb version, it was 30USD cheaper than the 2gb one and to this day they're the worst 30 bucks I saved in my life...
Silva
And here I am sitting on a budget RX580 with just 4Gb. Most games don't even hit 3Gb, little ones get close to 3.5Gb and I could just lower one or two settings and I'm good.
For my next GPU I'll make sure to get 8Gb, but for now: 4Gb is enough for 1080p.
PS: There's literally no difference between High and Ultra textures at 1080p. I don't care about bragging rights so, why pay more?
Fox2232
It is not important if you can't distinct Max textures vs 2nd max textures on given resolution.
While 4GB vs 8GB 5500 XT is good academical example of card running out of VRAM before rendering capabilities. And while it shows that 8GB/s and 16GB/s PCIe bandwidth to system memory does not really help in such scenario.
It is still easily fixed by reducing setting that is not even making reasonable visual difference.
Crazy Serb
Looks like AMD is desperate when it comes to low-end. Clearly, 1650S is better choice then either version of 5500XT, but it only has 4gb of VRAM...
rm082e
Are there any games without mods that come close to needing more than 8GB of VRAM? I know there are plenty that will use up whatever you have, but I don't think I've heard of any that suffer from 8GB as a limitation.
Fox2232
Clearly, you do not know meaning of word "clearly".
TPU database says that aggregate performance across many games of 5500 XT is 2% slower than 1650 Super at 1080p. Considering additional 4GB of GDDR6, difference in power draw is rather negligible.
H83
Well, for those buying a new card, it´s better to skip the ones with 4gb, for those who already have such cards, they should continue with them because they are still good enough.
schmidtbag
4GB at 1080p is doable in most modern games, if you turn down texture detail a notch or two. It's even more doable if your GPU supports VRAM compression, where ironically, many older 4GB models don't (mine doesn't). Textures in modern games are meant to look good in 4K so unless you press your face up against the wall, you won't notice a difference when you scale the textures down at 1080p anyway. It isn't much of a difference, anyway.
Today, I wouldn't recommend 4GB for gaming purposes, and yet, it's overkill for the average home or office PC. 6GB I'd say is a safe minimum to play modern games.
Kool64
Many of my games regularly fill the 8gb of my 2070S especially now that I have a VR headset.
Venix
Normally from super duper ultra to normal the difference is rather small and to really notice you need to put pictures side by side in most games ...low/lowest is where suddenly you enter the blurry city and is when i look for an update my self , on normal the gains on fps are big most of the time and the vram demands ...well ... normal!
Mineria
There are some game where VR and 4K like more than 8GB when maxing out.
Some quick numbers for 4K with the highest quality preset used in games: Assassin's Creed Odyssey: 8.1-8.2GB, Battlefield 5 MP: 9.7-9.8GB, Call of Duty Black Ops 4: 10.5GB, Shadow of the Tomb Raider: 8.1GB, Star Wars Battlefront 2: 8.2-8,4 GB
So 8GB does not cut it anymore when going 4K max. and probably even worse when hitting 8K.
Mineria
Depends on game engine and what Ultra covers, shadows, anti aliasing, ray tracing and other settings can have a huge impact on visual quality.
Some games so much that a performance hungry setting is best to have completely off to avoid flickering caused by using a lower quality.
Or when some games only offer low quality methods like fxaa, I tend to disable fxaa in most games these days, since it tends to get really annoying while playing, rather a bit of aliasing than the shimmer it adds under movement.
Venix
Yeah i generalized a bit too much the most demanding game i played recently is m&b 2 and with a mix of medium and high i would say i have great experience no stuttering etc and that on 1440p with a 1060 6gb , and yeah raytracing is a whole different thing , literally from max to medium settings i had to stick my face against the screen and then i was like oh yeah this is not so sharp on some finer details on the scales on a scale mail, considering on the game i am spending my time mostly on the map ....or on a horse rushing with my polearm around cleaving heads like an orc i could not care less 😛
