How relevant is AMD 16GB VRAM for 4h gaming?

[e22big]

I found that in most game, 4k basically only use some where between 4-6GB of VRAM, however, there is a single instance where my game basically told me that 8GB of VRAM is not enough to even load a scene in-game (Battlefleet Gothic Armada II.) Pretty sure that it's a bug or the game just got very badly optimsed at 4k but this makes me wonder if 10GB or VRAM on Nvidia 3080 is really enough to run game at 4k.

 

I do think that for the most part, Nvidia Ray Tracing and DLSS is still a lot more attractive than AMD raw performance (at least until they managed to implement their Super Resolution to at least DLSS 2.0 level) but if 8GB of VRAM can't even make the modern day none-AAA title run, who know? May be that 16GB VRAM that AMD offered are relevant after all. 

 

What are you guy thought on this?

[Deli]

Don't only consider today. If you buy a high end GPU. You think what happens in 2 years as well.

[Mark Kaine]

Depends on the games. 

 

The game I'm playing easily fills up the 11G of a 1080ti (and also brings it to its knees occasionally apparently) so the more the merrier! 

 

If you just play fortnite and csgo 4-6G are probably plenty... 

[e22big]

Just now, Mark Kaine said:

Depends on the games. 

 

The game I'm playing easily fills up the 11G of a 1080ti (and also brings it to its knees occasionally apparently) so the more the merrier! 

 

If you just play fortnite and csgo 4-6G are probably plenty... 

really? what kind of titles are you playing? I honestly never see a game used even more than 8GB or VRAM before, even at 4k

[tikker]

1 minute ago, e22big said:

really? what kind of titles are you playing? I honestly never see a game used even more than 8GB or VRAM before, even at 4k

This.

3 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

The game I'm playing easily fills up the 11G of a 1080ti (and also brings it to its knees occasionally apparently) so the more the merrier!

It's hard to check, but the big question this whole debate revolves around is does it actually use all 11 GB or just allocate it (which is what games and tools often report). Since you're not usually playing multiple games at the same time, games will usually try to allocate all the memory it can get and report that as memory "usage".

[Mark Kaine]

Just now, e22big said:

what kind of titles

MONSTER HUNTER WORLD 

 

RESIDENT EVIL 2 does it too. 

 

 

And I expect future Capcom titles to do it as well. 

 

 

[e22big]

1 minute ago, Mark Kaine said:

MONSTER HUNTER WORLD 

 

RESIDENT EVIL 2 does it too. 

 

 

And I expect future Capcom titles to do it as well. 

 

 

thanks, pretty sure that Monster Hunter World run with much less VRAM though (it run on PS4 afterall) 

 

guess I'll go comparing it performance with newer card with lower VRAM and see how the performance compared

[Sakkura]

Nobody really knows, but bear in mind we are right on the cusp of a new console generation, where VRAM requirements can increase faster than usual.

[tikker]

4 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

MONSTER HUNTER WORLD 

 

RESIDENT EVIL 2 does it too. 

 

 

And I expect future Capcom titles to do it as well. 

 

 

Interesting. Didn't know RE2 was such a VRAM hog.

[Mark Kaine]

Just now, e22big said:

thanks, pretty sure that Monster Hunter World run with much less VRAM though (it run on PS4 afterall) 

At ~ 26fps yes it did. 

 

And of course it does, pc games scale, but not maxed out, it'll just run at 15fps and eventually crash... 

 

 

[jeanluckpiccard]

15 minutes ago, e22big said:

I found that in most game, 4k basically only use some where between 4-6GB of VRAM, however, there is a single instance where my game basically told me that 8GB of VRAM is not enough to even load a scene in-game (Battlefleet Gothic Armada II.) Pretty sure that it's a bug or the game just got very badly optimsed at 4k but this makes me wonder if 10GB or VRAM on Nvidia 3080 is really enough to run game at 4k.

 

I do think that for the most part, Nvidia Ray Tracing and DLSS is still a lot more attractive than AMD raw performance (at least until they managed to implement their Super Resolution to at least DLSS 2.0 level) but if 8GB of VRAM can't even make the modern day none-AAA title run, who know? May be that 16GB VRAM that AMD offered are relevant after all. 

 

What are you guy thought on this?

Today 16 GB vram is way overkill for 99% of the titles. However, 5 years ago people were saying the same about 6/8GB. I'm sure in the (somewhat near) future, 16GB will be needed.

[e22big]

1 minute ago, Mark Kaine said:

At ~ 26fps yes it did. 

 

And of course it does, pc games scale, but not maxed out, it'll just run at 15fps and eventually crash... 

 

 

didn't check monster hunter world yet but RE2 defintely use a lot less than 11GB, are you sure this isn't a VRAM bug on your part? I know some game like Total War series that tend to have a lot of this problem at 4k (where they just refuse to use more the majority of VRAM available)

 

 

[Stahlmann]

1 minute ago, Mark Kaine said:

At ~ 26fps yes it did. 

 

And of course it does, pc games scale, but not maxed out, it'll just run at 15fps and eventually crash... 

Turn down only texture settings ingame. If you see a noticeable improvement in performance then it's a VRAM bottleneck. If you don't see more performance on lower texture settings, it's just the GPU not being fast enough. As long as there is no VRAM bottleneck, modern GPUs don't really care about texture settings. This is a simple way to check for VRAM bottlenecks.

[Mark Kaine]

3 minutes ago, tikker said:

Interesting. Didn't know RE2 was such a VRAM hog.

Both these games have very fine grained settings, and show you exactly how much vram they need, if you go over you'll immediately notice issues... But, man, does it look good lol... 

 

I can play RE 2 at ~ medium settings, but as soon I up the texture resolutions which brings me over the vram limit there will be issues, aka slowdowns and crashes. (game even warns you about exactly that) 

 

MHW also at medium settings, similar scenario but I also have to use "dynamic resolution" or otherwise there will be dips to 15fps, and, crashes... 

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

4 minutes ago, jeanluckpiccard said:

Today 16 GB vram is way overkill for 99% of the titles. However, 5 years ago people were saying the same about 6/8GB. I'm sure in the (somewhat near) future, 16GB will be needed.

And they also said games would never use more than 4 cores... lol 

[tikker]

12 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Both these games have very fine grained settings, and show you exactly how much vram they need, if you go over you'll immediately notice issues... But, man, does it look good lol... 

 

I can play RE 2 at ~ medium settings, but as soon I up the texture resolutions which brings me over the vram limit there will be issues, aka slowdowns and crashes. (game even warns you about exactly that) 

 

MHW also at medium settings, similar scenario but I also have to use "dynamic resolution" or otherwise there will be dips to 15fps, and, crashes... 

 

 

This made me go in and check my settings from my playthrough: all settings maxed out at 1080p running on a 1080 Ti. It indeed warns that it "requires" 12.34 GB out of 10.87 GB available and serious bugs may occur. I've never had a single issue through my entire playthrough; slowdowns nor crashes.

[Mark Kaine]

15 minutes ago, tikker said:

This made me go in and check my settings from my playthrough: all settings maxed out at 1080p running on a 1080 Ti. It indeed warns that it "requires" 12.34 GB out of 10.87 GB available and serious bugs may occur. I've never had a single issue through my entire playthrough; slowdowns nor crashes.

Thats entirely possible but when I set my texture settings above 4G I'll have massive, random slowdowns, if I set it under 4G the game runs mostly fine for several hours *without* slowdowns. 

 

Edit: which kind of makes sense with the 1060's meager 6G as other settings also use Vram obviously 

 

 

[tikker]

6 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Thats entirely possible but when I set my texture settings above 4G I'll have massive, random slowdowns, if I set it under 4G the game runs mostly fine for several hours *without* slowdowns. 

 

Edit: which kind of makes sense with the 1060's meager 6G as other settings also use Vram obviously 

 

 

Ah right. In my mind we were all talking about beastly cards I can i magine 6 GB being much closer to the actual usage or at least limit and showing stronger effects.

[PurpleWave]

2 hours ago, e22big said:

I found that in most game, 4k basically only use some where between 4-6GB of VRAM, however, there is a single instance where my game basically told me that 8GB of VRAM is not enough to even load a scene in-game (Battlefleet Gothic Armada II.) Pretty sure that it's a bug or the game just got very badly optimsed at 4k but this makes me wonder if 10GB or VRAM on Nvidia 3080 is really enough to run game at 4k.

 

I do think that for the most part, Nvidia Ray Tracing and DLSS is still a lot more attractive than AMD raw performance (at least until they managed to implement their Super Resolution to at least DLSS 2.0 level) but if 8GB of VRAM can't even make the modern day none-AAA title run, who know? May be that 16GB VRAM that AMD offered are relevant after all. 

 

What are you guy thought on this?

if you plan to play VR its veryyyy easy to blow past 8gb esp. with supersampling

[jeanluckpiccard]

50 minutes ago, PurpleWave said:

if you plan to play VR its veryyyy easy to blow past 8gb esp. with supersampling

I play a lot of VR and have never had this issue...not sure about supersampling. Which games are you referring to?

[ewitte]

There are only a few titles without mods that even suffer much performance loss with 8GB cards at 4k.  Even then your usually using "next gen" settings its easy enough to drop and not notice a difference. Allocation isn't the same as needed.  I'll consider upgrading again with RDNA 3 that isn't all that far away to be to the point of "needing" 10GB especially since I run 3440x1440.

[PurpleWave]

On 10/29/2020 at 1:58 PM, jeanluckpiccard said:

I play a lot of VR and have never had this issue...not sure about supersampling. Which games are you referring to?

any games where you want really good clarity requiring 400%+ supersampling in steamvr

[jerubedo]

There's a few considerations here:

 

1) Games right now are using 4-6GB in 4k, but that's largely because consoles only have about 6GB of VRAM available to them in games (the other 2 is for the system and its various processes since VRAM is shared on both PS4 and Xbox One). Devs will absolutely eat up any and all resources given to them. PS5 and Series X will both have 16GB of VRAM. Believe me when I say we will see games using close to that! It likely won't be in any kind of optimized fashion, but that bring me to number 2:

 

2) Poorly optimized games. Some games will use more than 6GB of VRAM simply from being poorly optimized. Those games being "just poorly optimized examples and not representative"  doesn't hold as an argument because, well, if they're games you want to play then that's what you're stuck with, unless the devs fix optimizations, which I would not count on.

 

3) Textures are constantly improving. 8K is just starting to gain some traction (nowhere near mainstream of course). That's not to say that these cards are even capable of doing 8K gaming, but using 8K textures at 4K (effectively texture down-sampling) still yields a nice uplift in quality, and that will eat up VRAM.

[PurpleWave]

for instance, even the SteamVR home environments, there is such a gigantic increase in fidelity and clarity going from 100% supersampling (default) to 500%, which is like 4096x4096 per eye and takes _EASILY_ 8gb of VRAM. For VR specificially the massive amount of clarity you get at those res flat out beats visual complexity, even games with simple "artstyle" or geometric complexity, like pavlov just look god tier. but really any game with simple artstyle. I have the Quest 2 and at 1900x1900/eye of actual pixels it looks near "photorealistic"

[e22big]

1 hour ago, jerubedo said:

There's a few considerations here:

 

1) Games right now are using 4-6GB in 4k, but that's largely because consoles only have about 6GB of VRAM available to them in games (the other 2 is for the system and its various processes since VRAM is shared on both PS4 and Xbox One). Devs will absolutely eat up any and all resources given to them. PS5 and Series X will both have 16GB of VRAM. Believe me when I say we will see games using close to that! It likely won't be in any kind of optimized fashion, but that bring me to number 2:

 

2) Poorly optimized games. Some games will use more than 6GB of VRAM simply from being poorly optimized. Those games being "just poorly optimized examples and not representative"  doesn't hold as an argument because, well, if they're games you want to play then that's what you're stuck with, unless the devs fix optimizations, which I would not count on.

 

3) Textures are constantly improving. 8K is just starting to gain some traction (nowhere near mainstream of course). That's not to say that these cards are even capable of doing 8K gaming, but using 8K textures at 4K (effectively texture down-sampling) still yields a nice uplift in quality, and that will eat up VRAM.

That's a good point and defintiely something that I am quite concern with

 

Although, we need to also consider the fact that console 16GB of VRAN also served as RAM both Xbox and PS5 if I remeber correctly, which mean if a game want to use more than 10GB of VRAM, they will need to also use less than 6GB of RAM? Not sure that will be some configuration that dev will want to be using