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[Die Shrink Telegrams] GPU VRAM Requirements - 12 years ago, and into the future (Patreon)

Published:
2023-02-23 06:24:59
Edited:
2023-02-23 18:02:57
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

This has been a Die Shrink Subject we've wanted to do for a few months now...and with all of the hullabaloo regarding recent releases requiring tons of VRAM, we're now sure it's the right time - let's talk about what VRAM requirements used to be, and then based on that what we expect them to be in a few years from now!This episode is about everything VRAM!  What is an example in the past where VRAM suddenly became an issue for you?  What are your worries or hopes for VRAM in the future?For example - when Dan built his first PC in 2012, we were constantly told "1GB of VRAM is plenty" - and it wasn't VERY quickly...You have ~16 hours to write in below!  Be concise, be thoughtful, and use good grammar to be considered for being read on the episode!

Comments

Timo H

Hi Tom and Dan, I put out another related question that [cheap ECC] would fit in 256GB or more whole game, so would 24 or 48GB vram help in similar way, load all 4K textures closer for shaders (gpu die) ? Curiously 3060 12GB beats lot of more powerful cards, computewise, coz latency to fetch extra data from dram is gone. As NX Gamer pointed out several times in latest BS, games get worst hit by needing to fetch from disk, and as long as directstorage aint there yet, no good solution exists to narrow this gap.

Blake Sasturain

A good example of when I realized vram was going to a limiting factor was way back in the past when I used to try to stay on the bleeding edge was when I chose to go 2 way then 3 way sli with gtx 780 ti. 3gb of vram limited the quality of the settings I could use regardless of the processing power available. I rarely ever saw decent scaling beyond 2 GPUs anyway . I am not rocking a rtx 3090 and doubt 24gb will a limiting factor for games anytime soon :)

Dave Scholze

Consoles like the PS5 and XBox Series have about 16GB of shared memory used of both GPU and CPU, while the PC usually (except when using SOCs) distinguishes between system memory (RAM) and video memory (VRAM). How do you think this architectural difference can influence future VRAM requirements? May it mean that 16GB console memory equals 16 or 12GB VRAM for PCs? Can we even perhaps reduce VRAM usage in the future with technologies such as extremely fast SSDs paired with resizable bar and the like?

yoda king

Hey Dan and Tom. I wanted to know if you guys could link more information on the technicals about vram to learn more! Also, could you start from the beginning about why vram is important and perhaps some nuances people miss when talking about vram?

PCDog

Ok, this is something I’ve heard for a long time…”You’ll never need more than X amount of VRAM.” The first time I heard that sentence it was 2 MB of VRAM. Then it was 4 MB. Then 8 MB. And on and on and now here we are talking about GB of VRAM! Yeah, graphics keeps improving and with those improvements comes greater demand on hardware.

KarbinCry

Sorry Tom/Dan, this topic is completely irrelevant to me. I got the Holy VII, I got High Bandwidth Cache Controller, and now with a registry hack, I also got SAM. VRAM capacity? Bandwidth? Those are no concerns for us enlightened by the radiant Supernova Vega.

Max Eliaser

Nonetheless, I would argue that there were and are a lot of graphics cards that were/are unnecessarily ahead of the curve. (R9 390 for instance.)

KingHarkinian

We are in a transition period away from 1080p into a 1440p midrange and 4K high tier for graphics. I wonder if right now, game models aren't already designed for 2K/4K, but if they're not, how much bigger will models become? Assuming that models grow with resolution, I wouldn't be surprised to have to pack up several times more stuff into VRAM within 4-5 years.

Prior is the theme 999

The only time VRAM became and issue for me was the 3070, it’s still an issue for me since it’s still my current card, but it’s frustrating because at points it definitely has more juice in the tank but then it’s hindered by the 8gb. I can’t imagine what people with 3080’s feel with 10gb. Honestly the whole ampere lineup makes no sense in terms of VRAM.

Cleansweep

Hey Tom and Dan, As someone who's done quite a bit of Photoshop work in the past, I've always been fairly aware of the fact that as the resolution of textures goes up, the filesize increases accordingly. This is especially true for anything with a photorealistic art style, which is why I've long been down on the paltry amounts of VRAM on Nvidia cards, even if they have better texture compression. My VRAM worry for future GPUs is VRAM capacities not keeping up with the reality that devs are targeting 4K TVs as primary displays, especially in midrange GPUs. My hope for the future is that someone develops a way to double the capacity on VRAM chips without increasing cost too much, and/or neural engines/accelerators can help produce high quality, high resolution textures from more reasonable sized files.

TMCPayton

Howdy, The Nvidia VRAM trend since Pascal has been to reduce the amount of VRAM for a given performance level with the new generation. Examples:, 1080 Ti 11GB -> 2080 8GB. 2080 Ti 11GB -> 3070 8GB 3090 24GB -> RTX 4070 Ti 12GB When and how might this trend buck? I'm tired of getting the same raster performance with less VRAM. Thanks

TMCPayton

Howdy, Will the AMD & Nvidia ever go back to having 2 VRAM capacities for the same card with one being twice the other? Like RX 580 4GB/8GB, GTX 960 2GB/4GB I loved this from a consumer's perspective. Thanks

TMCPayton

Howdy, It's a well known fact now that Ray Tracing significantly increases VRAM requirements. What upcoming (or current but lesser known) technologies will greatly incense or decrease VRAM requirements? Direct storage? VR? Thanks

10GHz Netburst

In a slower market as we have today, don't you think it would make sense to try to sell people "future proofed" products with excess VRAM to try to encourage them to spend their money anyway? Then when the market is hot you can just lean on the fact that people *want* to spend their money so they will buy things without needing an extra push? Basically counter-cyclical economics applied to GPUs...

Dr Forbin

Gee Tom and Dan I remember my first PC build buying a Voodoo 2 card, it had 8 MB of EDO memory and It was one of the first 3d graphics cards out. In a recent broken silicon you mentioned that 8GB of VRAM wasn't enough on a 3070. Would you speculate projecting 5 years out, what would be minimum for running games.

Kinihun25

Hey Tom and Dan, I'm slowly beginning to believe for the rest of this Gen that 12GB of VRAM is going to be the recommendation for 1440p at the highest settings and 16GB of VRAM for 4k at the highest settings. It's a little unfortunate for the people that spent a lot of money on 3070s(Ti) , and 3080s(Ti) expecting the cards to be 1440p or even 4k cards for a long time.

QuickJumper

Well I think AMD is intentionally focusing on making memory dies. Most likely in the next generations it will be important to scale memory efficiently and having mastered the chiplet technology they will be able to get ahead of Nvidia in the highest tier of GPU's.

Woody Chang

Hi Tom and Dan, I remember that I made my brother jealous in the 90s as I had a video card for my DOS machine that had 1 MB of VRAM. This allowed me to play TIE Fighter at 640x480 and up my Windows 95 display settings to 800x600 with 16 bit color. He was stuck with 256 colors for a little while before his own upgrade. As a more modern example, I had a GTX 670 that I got for my i5-3570k rig, which was great for games in the early 2010s. Unfortunately, I got out of PC gaming from 2014-2017, and by the time I got back in, 2GB of VRAM made you either reduce textures in many games to their lowest setting or have to deal with the memory swap stutter. Thankfully, I got a nice deal on a GTX 1060 6GB which served me until my current system when I splurged and got an RTX 3080. Hopefully, I won't be bottlenecked by the 10GB of VRAM, but I suspect I can make due with medium textures and DLSS. Thanks!

CompressedAIBlocks

Hello Tom and Dan, I think VRAM (and RAM) requirements will just keep climbing. New game engines, raytracing and other software techniques becoming the norm, and the dropping of 8th gen consoles, and unified RAM + guaranteed fast access storage on console will make this "issue" worse. I think 7th/8th generation of consoles and their games have spoiled PC gamers. This reminds me of late 90s to mid 2000s where upgrades were more of a norm because you might not have the compute performance or RAM/VRAM in this case. As for me I think this is problem has existed mostly on the Nvidia side of things, not saying ATi/AMD haven't had this issue but I remember my 7800 GT 256MB running into issues within the year of its release as this was the 2 year gap of Half-Life 2, FEAR, Doom 3, Quake 4, Prey, Call of Duty 2 etc.

TheforbiddenJuice

Hello Tom and Dan, I think the main "issue" is that PC gamers like to ride the edge of good enough to be cost effective. This is understandable, but it's sort of funny when computers and games inevitably increase in requirements and people are like "I was just fine a bit ago". That's the definition of having just enough, a little more and now your GPU doesn't have enough VRAM. It will happen with CPUs and cores, and systems with main RAM at some point (if not already). There's always a bottleneck.

Chris Rijk

Most people prefer simplicity and would rather not spend a lot of time optimising their settings for each game. Maybe you and the average listener here is fine with that but do you think it would be better is games took a more goal oriented approach to settings - eg you simply select VRAM usage, output screen resolution and target frame rate and the game adjusts the settings dynamically in order to achieve that?

Chris Rijk

Are two isolated pools of expensive memory really the best solution or should they be consolidated? Maybe in 2 years or so it will be common for games laptops to have 16GB of more of VRAM and 32GB of main memory. Maybe a better solution would be to have a single 32GB pool of fast main memory. That memory type could be optimised for cost or performance but would also require the CPU and GPU to be packaged together.

Brian Scanlon

I feel like buying the card with more VRAM has been the thing to do for a long time, but really it has never made sense. Games coming out for new cards were designed with prior generation limits in mind for the first year or two, after that new games are more demanding than what said card can handle regardless of VRAM. Typically games seem to target lowest common denominator and the extra VRAM just goes unused (unless an optional texture pack comes out post launch, and that has been exceedingly rare). I’m surprised that more VRAM is never really allocated based on the card in hand, but it must just be that games really don’t want more than the lowest VRAM amount any card tier offers. Ultimately, more VRAM seems flashy, but it won’t be used when much lower tier cards dominate the market. I doubt anything will max out the VRAM for the XTX during its useful lifetime.

FloridaMan

Would it be save to say that since 2016 the proper high end about of ram has gone up by a gigabyte each year? In 2016 8 gb was very good, and 2023 you need 13 or more (so a 16 gb card). I would expect the 16 gb cards today will hit VRAM limits limit in 2026 for native 4K, but by then FSR 2.x will be ubiquitious on all new titles

GamersUnite

Sup brothers dead to laws of Moore. Would Unreal Engine 5 lighting technologies want more VRAM over Ray Tracing or would faster memory be more beneficial? Which is cheaper, amount or speed of memory?

Craig W.

I currently have the RTX 3080 10 GB and I have an issue with Portal RTX running out of VRAM. But I think Nvidia intentionally crippled the game so it is more of a selling point for RTX 40 than anything else. I also used to own the GTX 970 and during the latter part of it's life I had to dial down textures a tick or two to fit in the 3.5 GB frame buffer. I find it insulting that Nvidia cripples VRAM amounts on their cards despite their heavy marketing push for ray-tracing and path-tracing and those features eat a ton of VRAM. Do you think with RDNA 4 or 5 that AMD may reach ray tracing parity with Nvidia for this reason alone (even if the raw RT performance may be a tad less)?