Do PC gamers feel 12GB of VRAM is simply not enough for the money in 2024?
Remember when eVGA decided they would rather leave the market entirely than spend one more day working with Nvidia?
Really?
Yup. It was something like 90% of their revenue, but 25% of their profit.
And now they have 0 revenue and 0 profit.
Yeah sadly they weren’t gonna be able to stay the same with their remaining products being expensive niche case motherboards and good power supplies. Hopefully the employees got good gigs elsewhere at least.
They still exist. However their website also says they’re “America’s #1 NVIDIA partner,” so…
They do seem to be winding down operations as a whole, though. It’s a deliberate choice on the owner’s part.
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I wish they would have started putting out AMD products. Powercolor just doesn’t feel like a flagship partner like evga was to nvidia.
I would’ve actually switched to AMD if EVGA did
GPUs haven’t been reasonably priced since the 1000 series.
And now there’s no coin mining promising some money back.
You mean Nvidia GPUs? I got my 6750XT for 500€, and I think it’s a good price for the performance I get.
That is still overpriced i think. Although, much less egregious than what Nv is doing. Launch msrp for a HD7850, which was the same category as the 6700XT today (upper middle tier) was 250 usd. A few years prior the 4850 started at 200 usd. Even the Rx 480 started at only 230 usd. And those were all very decent cards in their time.
I bought a GTX780 for $500 MSRP circa 2013. I considered that to be crazy expensive at the time, but I was going all out on that system. Currently I run a GTX1080Ti(bought used) with 11GB of VRAM and they want me to spend $600 for 1 more GB of VRAM? PS5 has 16 GB of shared memory, 16GB should be entry level of VRAM for a system thats expected to keep up with this generation of graphics. There’s no reason for Nvidia to do this other than to force users to upgrade sooner.
Funny part is the market is so fucked that reviewers are lauding this a decent deal. I think the 1080Ti will last me until OLED matures and I finally upgrade from a 1080p monitor. According to the steam survey most gamers are in a similar boat.
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Launch msrp for a HD7850, which was the same category as the 6700XT today (upper middle tier) was 250 usd.
There’s much more effort involved to produce modern GPU now. Either way, if NVidia would be truly greedy, they’d close gaming gpu business right away and would produce only AI accelerators. You can take same 4070, add $200 worth of GDDR chips to the layout and sell this for $15k minimum, shit would be on backorder.
Yeah right? I got my 6700 XT for just over $400USD. It was a great deal.
Just got my brand new 6800xt for $350, upgrading from a 970 screw Nvidia.
970 Ti doesn’t even exist
Whoops meant SC
That’s a shit deal when the 4070 is €550
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The new mining is AI… TSMC is at max capacity. They’re not going to waste too many wafers making gaming GPU when AI acceleratora are selling for $30k each
ugh
Nvidia over pricing their cards and limiting stock, acting like there is still a gpu shortage from all the crypto bros sucking everything up.
Right now, their competitors are beating them at hundreds of dollars below nvidias mrp like for like with the only true advantage nvidia has is in ray tracing and arguably VR.
It’s possible we’re approaching another shorter with the AI bubble though for the moment that seems to be pretty far off.
TL;DR Nvidia is trying to sell a card at twice it’s value cause greed.
They’re beating AMD at ray tracing, upsampling (DLSS vs FSR), VR, and especially streaming (NVENC). For the latter look at the newly announced beta partnership with Twitch and OBS which will bring higher quality transcoding and easier setup only for Nvidia for now and soon AV1 encoding only for Nvidia (at first anyway).
The raw performance is mostly there for AMD with the exception of RT, and FSR has gotten better. But Nvidia is doing Nvidia shit and using the software ecosystem to entrench themselves despite the insane pricing.
And they beat AMD in efficiency! I’m (not) surprised that people ignore this important aspect which matters in noise, heat and power usage.
Toms Hardware did a test, Rx 6800 is leader there. Next, RTX 3070, is 4.3% worse. Are their newer cards more efficient than AMD’s newer cards?
They seem to be but honestly, this generation hasn’t been very impressive for both team green and red. I got a 6950 XT last year and seeing all these new releases has only proven that I made a good investment.
Nothing compelling enough for me to hop off of a titan Xp yet. (Bought a titan because it was cheaper than a 1070 at the time because of scalpers)
30 series maybe.
40 series power usage Nvidia destroys AMD.
The 4070 uses WAY less than a 3070… It’s 200 (220 for supera) that’s nearly more than my 1070 170w
Streaming performance is really good on AMD cards, IME. Upscaling is honestly close and getting closer.
I dont think better RT performance is worth the big premium or annoyances nvidia cards bring. Doubly so on Linux.
And AI. They’re beating the pants off AMD at AI.
True enough. I was thinking more of the gaming use case. But even beyond AI and just a general compute workload they’re beating the pants off AMD with CUDA as well.
Couldn’t agree more! Abstracting to a general economic case – those hundreds of dollars are a double digit percentage of the overall cost! Double digit % cost increase for single digit % performance doesn’t quite add up @nvidia :)
Especially with Google going with TPUs for their AI monstrosities it makes less and less sense at large scale for a consumers to pay the Nvidia tax just for CUDA compatibility. Especially with the entrance of things like SYCL that help programmers avoid vendor lock.
My RTX 4060 has 16GB of RAM. What on earth makes them think people would go for 12GB?
Not being a power of 2 gives me displeasure.
It is in base 6.
And base 3 and 12. But we don’t really use those numbering systems.
I have a 2060 super with 8GB. The VRAM is enough currently for FHD gaming - or at least isn’t the bottle neck, so 12 GB might be fine with this use case BUT I’m also toying around with AI models and some of the current models already ask for 12 GB VRAM to run the complete model. It’s not, that I would never get a 12 GB card as an upgrade, but you’d be sure, that I’d do some research for all alternatives and then it wouldn’t be my first choice but a compromise, as it wouldn’t future proof me in this regard.
Do you think there is a large overlap of people who buy $600-$900 cards and like 1080p?
My 3080 10GB runs out of VRAM personally at 1440p. I would never get <16GB again.
Hard to say. I was an early adopter of FullHD, always had the equivalent of an xx80 card. Then I stepped back a bit with the 970, as it was the best upgrade path for me (considering I was only upgrading the GPU and the CPU would very likely be the bottle neck moving forward). I was thinking to move to higher resolutions with my new PC. Then my PSU fried my mainboard, CPU and GPU while covid and crypto currencies cause huge price spikes on almost every component and I had to pay way to much for what I’d get performance wise. That’s why I’m running a 2060 super now and stay on FHD.
I might consider upgrading the next time I need a new PC, as this left me in an awkward spot: If I want a higher resolution, I need a new monitor. If I buy one, I’d need a new GPU probably, too. And since my CPU would now be a bottleneck for the rig I should also change that in this process. Then I might want a new mainboard, as I’m currently only running on DDR-4 RAM, and so… the best way forward is basically a new PC (I might save some money by keeping my NVMe drive, etc…).
I’m not sure, what I’m going to do in the future. Up until around the GTX 970, you could get a decent rig that plays current games in FHD on ultra or very high and would continue doing for about 1-2 years. If you degrade to medium - high, probably 4-5 years. You could get that easily for ~900-1000 bucks (or less). Nowadays, the GPU alone can get you close to this price range…
I get it. 1080p is about 2.1 megapixels, while 1440p is already 3.69 megapixels - that’s 75% more pixels and thus, you need way more performance to render it (or rather raster and shade it). But still… I don’t like these prices.
Thanks, that was going to be exactly my question. I don’t see anyone choosing low memory for video but had no idea what ai needs
You can run Stable Diffusion XL on 8GB of VRAM (to generate images). For beginners, there’s e.g. the open source software Fooocus, which handles quite a lot of work for you - it sends your prompt to a GPT-2 model (running on your PC) to do some prompt engineering for you and then uses that to generate your images and generally features several presets, etc. to get going easily.
Jan (basically an open source software that resembles ChatGPT and allows you to use several AI models) can run in 8GB, but only for 3B models or quantized 7B models. They recommend at least 16GB for regular 7B models (which they consider “minimum usable models”). Then there are larger, more sophisticated models, that require even more.
Jan can run on CPU in your regular RAM. Since it’s chatting with you, it’s not too bad, when it spits out words slowly, but GPU is / would be nice here…
Thanks
I have a 4090 and I feel the pinch on vram with ai. It’s never enough.
I’ve seen people say that card is absurd. I’m not sure who is right there.
My Nvidia 1070 with 8gb vram is still playing all of my games. Not everything gets Ultra, nor my monitor isn’t 4K. Forever I am the “value buyer”. It’s hard to put money into something that is marginally better though. I thought 16g would be a no-brainer.
Exactly, people get to caught up in the Digital Foundry-ification of ultra max settings running at a perfect ~120 unlocked frames. Relax my dudes and remember the best games of your life were perfect dark with your friends running at 9 FPS.
1080p is fine, medium settings are fine. If the game is good you won’t sweat the details.
remember the best games of your life were perfect dark with your friends running at 9 FPS.
The frame rate was shat on at the time and with good reason, that was unplayable for me. Best times were Halo 4-16 local multiplayer.
As someone who really doesn’t care much for game graphics I feel that a comment I wrote a few months ago also fits here:
I’ve never really cared much about graphics in video games, and a game can still be great with even the simplest of graphics - see the Faith series, for example. Interesting story and still has some good scares despite the 8-bit graphics.
To me many of these games with retro aesthetics (either because they’re actually retro or the dev decided to go with a retro style) don’t really feel dated, but rather nostalgic and charming in their own special way.
And many other people also don’t seem to care much about graphics. Minecraft and Roblox are very popular despite having very simplistic graphics, and every now and then a new gameplay video about some horror game with a retro aesthetic will pop up on my recommended, and so far I’ve never seen anyone complain about the graphics, only compliments about them being interesting, nostalgic and charming.
Also I have a potato PC, and it can’t run these modern 8K FPS games anyway, so having these games with simpler graphics that I can actually run is nice. But maybe that’s just me.
FPS games tend to be better to run at lower settings to be more competitive anyway. You don’t want all the visual noise.
I kind of feel the same way about TV resolution. I have a 1080p TV and a 720p TV and I’m honestly fine with them. Sure, there’s better quality out there, but I can always go to the movies if I want that. And I have the advantages of TVs without any ‘smart’ bullshit. They can’t even connect to the internet.
I’m not saying no one else should buy 8k TVs or whatever, if that’s what you want, fine, but there are plenty of people I’ve talked to who feel the same way as me, so I’m glad they haven’t done anything like make us all change to new TVs again like they did when they updated to HD.
I literally have a higher resolution computer monitor than I do TV. My computer monitor costs more than my TV did too!
30fps is fine too on most games…
friend of mine makes do with a gtx960@720p and is perfectly fine with it, the fun games run. even new ones.
maybe an upgrade to digital foundry perfect 120fps would be worth it if it werent so damn expensive nowadays outside the us.
Not to shill for them but Alex makes it a point to run tests and to include optimized settings for non flagship hardware in every review he does. I’m not sure where your digital foundry nomenclatures are coming from.
And no, 30fps is not fine…
i was referring to the op i was responding to
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You lost me at 1080p. It’s a basic quality of life thing. Even 1440p is a HUGE upgrade even for regular computer use not even gaming.
I run 4k but I use/need it more work space at work than gaming.
600 $ for a card without 16 GB of VRAM is a big ask. I think getting a RX 7800 XT for 500 $ will serve you well for a longer time.
12gB vram is not a bottleneck in any current games on reasonable settings. There is no playable game/settings combination where a 7800xt’s 16gB offers any advantage. Or do you think having 15fps average is more playable than 5fps average(because the 4070s is ram bottlenecked)? Is this indicative of future potential bottlenecks? Maybe but i wouldnt be so sure.
The 4070 super offers significantly superior ray tracing performance, much lower power consumption, superior scaling(and frame generation) technology, better streaming/encoding stuff and even slightly superior rasterization performance to the 7800xt. Are these things worth sacrificing for 100€ less and 4gB vram? For most people they arent.
Amd’s offerings are competitive, not better. And the internet should stop sucking their dick, especially when most of the internet, including tech savvy people, dont even use AMD gpus. Hell, LTT even made a series of videos about how they had to “suffer” using AMD gpus, yet they usually join the nvidia shitting circlejerk.
I have an amd 580 card and have bought and recommended AMD gpus to people since the 9500/9700pro series. But my next gpu will almost certainly be an nvidia one. The only reason people are complaining is because nvidia can make a better gpu(as shown by the 4090) but they choose not to. While AMD literally cant make better gpus but they choose to only “competitively” price their gpus, instead of offering something better. Both companies suck.
Found the Nvidia fanboy
$100 less IS the advantage.
It’s not enough though and the sales are showing it. 7800xt is a decent card but it isnt an amazing offer, it is just a good one. For some people, It is a slightly better value for money option. But those nvidia things have value too. So the value proposition isnt as clearcut, even though it should be considering that AMD is behind.
The steam stats should tell you what consumers think. And while consumers are not infallible, they are a pretty good indicator. The most popular amd card is the 580, which is arguably one of the best cards of all time. Except it came out 6 years ago. Did AMD have a better marketing back then? No. Did they have the performance crown? Nope. But that didnt stop the 580 from being an amazing card.
The 7800xt could have been the new 580, mid/high end card, with decent vram. Except you could get the 580 for 200€, while the 7800xt costs literally three times as much. When your “good” card is so expensive, customers have higher expectations. It isnt just about running games well(cheaper cards can do that too), it is about luxury features, like ray tracing and upscaling tech.
Imagine if the 7800xt was 400€. We wouldnt even have this conversation. But it isnt. In fact, in Europe it launched at basically the same price as a 4070. Even today, it is 50€-80€ cheaper. If nvidia is scamming us with inferior offers, why arent AMD offers infinitely better in value? Because AMD is also scamming us, just very slightly less so.
$100 sure feels much more solid than rtx that a ton of games don’t even support. There are a bunch of people that just want to play in 4k and couldn’t care less about features you call luxury.
That requires more VRAM and 7800xt and xtx deliver that perfectly.
A ton? Try “most”.
I disagree.
D4 on Linux. Literally the only bottleneck is it eats 11GB of my 1080Ti’s VRAM for breakfast and then still wants lunch and dinner. Plays 4k on high with prefect fps otherwise. Starts glitching like crazy once VRAM is exhausted after 10-15 minutes.
Zero issues on a 20GB card. I understand that shitty code on single game is not exactly universal example, but it is a valid reason to want more VRAM.
Is this indicative of future potential bottlenecks? Maybe but i wouldnt be so sure.
This is exactly what I expect. I have seen what happened to my friends with their GTX 970 when 3.5 GB of VRAM wasn’t enough anymore. Even though the cards were still rasterizing quickly enough they weren’t useful for certains games anymore. Therefore I recently make sure I go for enough VRAM to extend the useful service life of my cards.
And I’m not just talking about buying AMD, I actually do buy them. I first had the HD 5850 with 1GB, then got my friends HD 5870 also with 1GB (don’t remember if I used it in crossfire or just replaced), then two of my friends each sold me their HD 7850 with 2GB for cheap and I ran crossfire, then I bought a new R9 380 with 4GB when a game that was important to me at the time couldn’t deal with crossfire well, then I bought a used RX 580 with 8GB and finally the RX 6800 with 16 GB two years ago.
At some point I also bought a used GTX 960 because we were doing some CUDA stuff at University, but that was pretty late, when they weren’t current anymore, and it was only used in my Linux server.
But my rtx :(
The RAM is so lame. It really needed more.
Performance exceeding the 3090, but limited by 12 gigs of RAM .
4070 is $600. That seems like total shit to me. That’s why.
You all should check prices comparing dual fan 3070’s to 4070’s they are a $40 difference on Amazon. Crazy to see. They completely borked their pricing scheme trying to get whales and crypto miners to suck their 40 series dry and wound up getting blue balled hard.
Aren’t they taking the 4080 completely off the market too?
laughs in 6800XT
Wait, they didn’t put the 4070 super at 16 GB?
They clearly believe customers will always buy nvidia over amd so why bother competing just make an annoyingly segmented lineup.
Nope. Even my 3080 Ti has 12Gb. I was waiting for the 4000 series refresh but i think I’ll just wait and see what the 5000 series looks like.
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If I understand it’s a limitation of the bus width which they kept the same.
I don’t know about everyone else, but I still play at 1080. It looks fine to me and I care more about frames than fidelity. More VRAM isn’t going to help me here so it is not a factor when looking at video cards. Ignoring the fact I just bought a 4070, I wouldn’t not skip over a 4070 Super just because it has 12GB of RAM.
This is a card that targets 1440p. It can pull weight at 4k, but I’m not sure if that is justification to slam it for not having the memory for 4k.
It can pull weight at 4k, but I’m not sure if that is justification to slam it for not having the memory for 4k.
There are many games that cut it awfully close with 12GB at 1440p, for some it’s actually not enough. And when Nvidia pushes Raytracing as hard as they do, not giving us the little extra memory we need for that is just a dick move.
Whatever this card costs, 12GB of vram is simply not appropriate.
Is it weird that until I read this I forgot that GPUs can make graphics
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If someone says they don’t notice a difference between 60 FPS and 120+ FPS, I think… okay, it is diminishing returns, 60 is pretty good. But if someone says they don’t notice a difference between 30 and 60… you need to get your eyes checked mate.
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It depends on the game, quick action packed stuff you can see the jumping and in something like a shooter it can be a disadvantage.
For something like Slay the Spire tho, totally fine.
I’m at the age where if games require such quick reactions that the difference in FPS matters, I’m going to get my ass handed to me by the younguns anyway…
Well maybe if you had a 240hz monitor… ;)
Totally fair, just worth point out that it can/does make a difference in those games as it can literally mean the difference in firing where someone was rather then where they are because of how long it takes for you to see the next frame.
My monitor is only 1440p, so it’s just what i need. I ordered the Founders Edition card from Best Buy on a whim after I stumbled across it at launch time by coincidence. I’d been mulling over the idea of getting a prebuilt PC to replace my laptop for a few weeks at that point and was on the lookout for sales on ones with a 4070. Guess I’ll be building my own instead now.
I think the only reason you’d really need that kind of grunt is on a 4K TV anyway, and even then you can use DLSS or whatever the other one is to upscale.
I mean yeah when I‘m searching for GPUs I specifically filter out anything that‘s less than 16GB of VRAM. I wouldn‘t even consider buying it for that reason alone.
And here I’m thinking upgrading from two 512mb cards to a GTX 1660 SUPER with 6GB VRAM is going to be good for another 10 years. The heck does someone need 16 gigs for?
Gaming in 4k or AI (e.g stable diffusion or language models)
Future proofing. GPUs are expensive and I expect to be able to use it for at least the next 7 years, even better if it lasts longer than that.
VR uses a lot of RAM.
Unless your gaming that’s fine.
But if you want to play any newer AAA games (even less than 5-8 years old) or use more than 1080p. You’ll need better.
AI. But you’re right my 4G 5500XT so far is putting up a valiant fight though I kinda dread trying out CP77 again after the big patch it’s under spec now. Was a mistake to buy that thing in the first place, should’ve gone with 8G but I just had to be pigheaded with my old “workstation rule” – Don’t spend more on the GPU than on the CPU.
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And I thought I had the lamest card on the block with my 2GB. …
I haven’t paid attention to GPUs since I got my 3080 on release day back in Covid.
Why has acceptable level of VRAM suddenly doubled vs 4 years ago? I don’t struggle to run a single game on max settings at high frames @ 1440p, what’s the benefit that justifies the cost of 20gb VRAM outside of AI workloads?
An actual technical answer: Apparently, it’s because while the PS5 and Xbox Series X are technically regular x86-64 architecture, they have a design that allows the GPU and CPU to share a single pool of memory with no loss in performance. This makes it easy to allocate a shit load of RAM for the GPU to store textures very quickly, but it also means that as the games industry shifts from developing for the PS4/Xbox One X first (both of which have separate pools of memory for CPU & GPU) to the PS5/XSX first, VRAM requirements are spiking up because it’s a lot easier to port to PC if you just keep the assumption that the GPU can handle storing 10-15 GB of texture data at once instead of needing to refactor your code to reduce VRAM usage.
Perfect answer thank you!
Lmao
We have your comment: what am I doing with 20gb vram?
And one comment down: it’s actually criminal there is only 20gb vram
Lol
I’m maxed on VRAM in VR for the most part with a 3080. It’s my main bottleneck.
Current gen consoles becoming the baseline is probably it.
As games running on last gen hardware drop away, and expectations for games rise above 1080p, those Recommended specs quickly become an Absolute Minimum. Plus I think RAM prices have tumbled as well, meaning it’s almost Scrooge-like not to offer 16GB on a £579 GPU.
That said, I think the pricing is still much more of an issue than the RAM. People just don’t want to pay these ludicrous prices for a GPU.
If only game developers optimized their games…
The newest hardware is getting powerful enough that devs are banking on people just buying better cards to play their games.
GPU rendering and AI.
Perhaps not the biggest market but consumer cards (especially nvidia’s) have been the preferred hardware in the offline rendering space -ie animation and vfx- for a good few years now. They’re the most logical investment for freelancers and small to mid studios thanks to hardware raytracing. CUDA and later Optix may be anecdotal on the gaming front, but they completely changed the game over here
Personally I need it for video editing & 3D work but I get that’s a niche case compared to the gaming market.
insert linus torvalds nvidia clip here
