Is 3 GB of VRAM enough?

[Dom_wpc__]

I will soon be building my first gaming PC 

with a Ryzen 5 2600 and GTX 1060 3GB 

so I was wondering, is 3 GB VRAM enough? 

I don't really plan to play any games that are like extremely demanding and I'm not going to be going over 1080p since that's the max resolution of my monitor 

this will be my first time properly gaming on a PC though so I have no idea of how far I'm going to jump down the rabbit hole and play more games that may or may not be more demanding on VRAM, so I really don't know, what do you guys think? either way I don't really have an extra £70 lying around to buy the 6GB version and I've already gone a little over budget 

[Mick Naughty]

Depends on the game. Some don’t run so well, others are perfectly fine. 

 

Ive only had an issue once but it was from surround gaming. 

 

If you hit the limit, turn some things down. I would rather pay more once for a 6gb version instead of suffering gameplay from needing a bit more.  

[191x7]

Steve from HardwareUnboxed did some testing.

3GB of VRAM on a GTX 1060 turns out to be OK for most modern games IF you have 16GB of system RAM. Newer games might need more.
Some titles already require more than 4GB for the VRAM allocation, so I'd rather recommend a Radeon RX 570 8GB or RX 580 8GB or even an RX 590 8GB.

[Dom_wpc__]

4 minutes ago, 191x7 said:

Steve from HardwareUnboxed did some testing.

3GB of VRAM on a GTX 1060 turns out to be OK for most modern games IF you have 16GB of system RAM. Newer games might need more.
Some titles already require more than 4GB for the VRAM allocation, so I'd rather recommend a Radeon RX 570 8GB or RX 580 8GB or even an RX 590 8GB.

when built the system will have 1 stick of 8GB 3000mhz Corsair vengeance

but the price has gone down so much, so I'm just going to add another Identical stick in a few months to take it up to 16GB and more importantly get that bandwidth boost that comes with dual channel

[DrMacintosh]

23 minutes ago, DomDoesTech said:

with a Ryzen 5 2600 and GTX 1060 3GB 

No, get an RX 570/580 instead.

[191x7]

Going with an RX 570 8GB might allow you to start with 2x 8GB of RAM. It's much cheaper than a GTX 1060 3GB.

How about holding off a few weeks? According to some leaks, we might get a new nVidia release early this month, a GTX 1660Ti, that might lower the prices of the 1060 cards.

The 1660Ti might perform nearly the 1070 levels for the price of a GTX 1060.

 

Corsair Vengeance isn't the best choice for Ryzen.

 

Have you seen Wendell's (Level1Techs) video about Ryzen and RAM speeds? They "OC-ed" some random 2400MHz CL15 RAM to 3000+ MHz (with higher timings) and got the max performance from the Ryzen. Ryzen's infinity fabric is related to the RAM frequency, not so much the speed.

[SliceT]

2 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

No, get an RX 570/580 instead.

This! for the money you pay to buy a 1060 3Gb you can get a better card like 580 4Gb.

[Vejnemojnen]

If you already have the 1060 3GB, you can keep it for a while. Just don't set everything for ultra or maximal, dropping a few settings to high will spare a lot of required VRAM, with minimal-negliable impact on graphics quality.. Later you can upgrage.