Should I be concerned about GPU VRAM?

[Dare Dreevs]

Hi everyone!

 

With the current state of the market, I'm not immediately looking to buy a gpu, my window is within the next year or so.

 

I've recently dipped back into learning about the state of PC hardware, but I'm still not comfortable buying one without a little help.

 

 

My questions

 

1- Is the 8GB/10GB of VRAM in the 3070/3080 looking like it will hold up with games in the near future?

 

2- As someone who will not be looking at doing anything above 4k 60-120fps(I know these are fairly high settings), is there a card on the market that can hit these with high(not max) settings and have a little future proofing?

 

 

I have these questions based on watching performances for the 3070/3080. Games like Cyberpunk seem to already take up 8GB of VRAM and they both seem to struggle with max settings even with DLSS on. I'm guessing that Cyberpunk has it's own "future proofing" by letting things be cranked up way higher than is standard right now, but I haven't followed things closely enough to be comfortable assuming. 

 

I've also watched things like unreal engine 5's "Nanite" tech, which to my understanding seems to show very high quality textures with much less resources required than normal. I'm not sure if optimizations like this and others will mean my concerns over VRAM and hitting high performance in general won't be as important going forward.

 

My end goal is to get 4k 120fps with ray tracing and not pay 3090 prices(yes, I want my cake and I want to eat it too!)

 

As I mentioned I have no problem waiting for next gen if that's what makes sense here. I know people here will have a much better sense than me over if even next gen is a realistic option for what I want.

 

 

Thanks in advance!

 

[Sorenson]

From my understanding, GPU usage readings can be a bit inaccurate. According to gamers nexus, games will "allocate" more GPU memory that way it is available when it needs to be "used". This apparently means that games are not using as much VRAM as they are reporting in monitoring software such as MSI afterburner. 

 

I personally, haven't had an issue running most games at 4k 60 on my 4k tv with a 3070. If I did in the future I would just set the game to run at 1440p (I honestly can't tell the difference in most games between 4k and 1440p with how good tv upscaling). The solution i'm going with to future proof my setup is actually saving up for a new tv that supports HDMI 2.1 VRR and 120hz. That way I can enable gsync/freesync, instead of vsync, and forget about the FPS as long as it is reasonable. 

[Dare Dreevs]

24 minutes ago, Sorenson said:

From my understanding, GPU usage readings can be a bit inaccurate. According to gamers nexus, games will "allocate" more GPU memory that way it is available when it needs to be "used". This apparently means that games are not using as much VRAM as they are reporting in monitoring software such as MSI afterburner. 

 

I personally, haven't had an issue running most games at 4k 60 on my 4k tv with a 3070. If I did in the future I would just set the game to run at 1440p (I honestly can't tell the difference in most games between 4k and 1440p with how good tv upscaling). The solution i'm going with to future proof my setup is actually saving up for a new tv that supports HDMI 2.1 VRR and 120hz. That way I can enable gsync/freesync, instead of vsync, and forget about the FPS as long as it is reasonable. 

Cool! Thanks so much, Sorenson!

 

What you mentioned about allocating more VRAM than is needed is very helpful, I'm gonna check out the gamers nexus video on it! 

 

Also, I didn't realize how good a tv's upscaling can be, pretty cool, I'll have to keep that in mind.

 

 

Thanks again and congrats on getting your hands on a 3070!

[Sorenson]

3 minutes ago, Dare Dreevs said:

Also, I didn't realize how good a tv's upscaling can be, pretty cool, I'll have to keep that in mind.

This is how I played Jedi Fallen Order on my old 1080 and couldn't even tell it wasn't 4k 

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Thanks again and congrats on getting your hands on a 3070!

Thanks man! just got it last week by being incredibly lucky