Amd rx 5500 xt/570/580/470/480 4 vs 8 gigs of vram?

[Pc6777]

Hey, I'm sure this has been asked before in the past, but it's 2021, maybe things have changed. These are all amd cards with similar preformance so I kinda treat them all the same. I have a 570 and am getting a 5500 xt for one of my PCs. Are these cards powerful enough to be bottlenecked by 4 gigs of vram? Is there any senerio were 8 gigs would be worth it?

[Vishera]

44 minutes ago, Pc6777 said:

Are these cards powerful enough to be bottlenecked by 4 gigs of vram?

It doesn't matter how powerful they are,screen resolution and textures are mainly what consumes VRAM.

So if you have 4GB VRAM you will have to lower texture quality and resolution in some games in order to stay within limit.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Pc6777 said:

Hey, I'm sure this has been asked before in the past, but it's 2021, maybe things have changed. These are all amd cards with similar preformance so I kinda treat them all the same. I have a 570 and am getting a 5500 xt for one of my PCs. Are these cards powerful enough to be bottlenecked by 4 gigs of vram? Is there any senerio were 8 gigs would be worth it?

I owned an RX 570 8GB for a while and never saw the VRAM go past 4GB, and if it did, I was getting sub-30FPS, meaning the game was demanding resources that the card didn't have, but VRAM that it did have.

 

Giving that much VRAM to cards that weak won't boost performance if you use them as intended, i.e. in 1080p with medium settings. Take the VRAM if it's $10 more expensive, but I wouldn't pay any significant amount over the 4GB version for this reason. The RX 580/590 8GB are a little more justified having that amount of VRAM, but cards like the 470/570 and even 480 won't make use of it 95% of the time.

[Pc6777]

2 minutes ago, wavem2 said:

I owned an RX 570 8GB for a while and never saw the VRAM go past 4GB, and if it did, I was getting sub-30FPS, meaning the game was demanding resources that the card didn't have, but VRAM that it did have.

 

Giving that much VRAM to cards that weak won't boost performance if you use them as intended, i.e. in 1080p with medium settings. Take the VRAM if it's $10 more expensive, but I wouldn't pay any significant amount over the 4GB version for this reason.

A 45 dollar difference and a possibly longer backorder wait because larger demand for 8 gigs. I won't use these cards at 1440p, but if something happens to my rtx 2060 and the market sucks or I'm broke I will, I trust all my games will be playable in that emergency senerio. So by the time t we cards go over 4 gigs, in most senerios your getting under 30 fps anyway?

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Pc6777 said:

A 45 dollar difference and a possibly longer backorder wait because larger demand for 8 gigs. I won't use these cards at 1440p, but if something happens to my rtx 2060 and the market sucks or I'm broke I will, I trust all my games will be playable in that emergency senerio. So by the time t we cards go over 4 gigs, in most senerios your getting under 30 fps anyway?

Yup, it's just not a worthwile investment in a card that will realistically be unusable in 3 years from now with any modern game. The future may demand 8GB of VRAM, which those cards have, but they demand more GPU horsepower than what most Polaris cards have to offer.

 

The recommended card for a lot of modern games is the GTX 970, which is kind of sort of a 4GB card.

[Pc6777]

Just now, wavem2 said:

Yup, it's just not a worthwile investment in a card that will realistically be unusable in 3 years from now with any modern game. The future may demand 8GB of VRAM, which those cards have, but they demand more GPU horsepower than what most Polaris cards have to offer.

Idk about 3 years, depends on your definition of usable I guess, 30 fps lowest settings is usable to me, I don't play lowest settings 30 fps but if it was my only option I would consider it "usable". I get what your saying, 8 gigs if vram is required for the future, but getting 8 gig 580s or 5500xts won't future proof it because its not just the vram that will hold it back in the future, it's the gpu itself.

[Guest]

Just now, Pc6777 said:

Idk about 3 years, depends on your definition of usable I guess, 30 fps lowest settings is usable to me, I don't play lowest settings 30 fps but if it was my only option I would consider it "usable". I get what your saying, 8 gigs if vram is required for the future, but getting 8 gig 580s or 5500xts won't future proof it because its not just the vram that will hold it back in the future, it's the gpu itself.

That's exactly what I'm getting at here, yes.

[Pc6777]

Just now, wavem2 said:

That's exactly what I'm getting at here, yes.

But for a media center, I'm not picky, and my favorite games arnt super new anyway, hell skyrim is 10 years old and its more fun to me than any newer games.

[Pc6777]

4 minutes ago, wavem2 said:

That's exactly what I'm getting at here, yes.

Plus my 2060 has 6 gigs of vram, and the 5500 xt has 50 percent less and is approx 50 percent weaker, so it makes sense.

[starry]

Where these 8gb AMD cards excel is in video editing and workstation applications. I dont know why you wouldnt get a card that supports CUDA for this, but the 8GB version does have a use for that stuff. We even saw this in the much weaker R9 290 8GB variant years and years ago. I have used an 8GB RX 480 in the past and this really improved my timeline scrubbing experience in premiere, regularly filling up to as much as 7-7.5GB. For gaming though, it doesnt matter at all.

[Pc6777]

45 minutes ago, starry said:

Where these 8gb AMD cards excel is in video editing and workstation applications. I dont know why you wouldnt get a card that supports CUDA for this, but the 8GB version does have a use for that stuff. We even saw this in the much weaker R9 290 8GB variant years and years ago. I have used an 8GB RX 480 in the past and this really improved my timeline scrubbing experience in premiere, regularly filling up to as much as 7-7.5GB. For gaming though, it doesnt matter at all.

Probably won't do much photoshop, if I do I will just dabble around nothing serious. I will probably use it to play my large collection of games, and as long is it can run future games at 720p 30 fps I'm fine with that, cuz it will be a backup to my main card in a different pc, and a backup dosn't need to be able to run my future games well, just run them at a playable frame rate at lowest settings. My this card should be able to run most of my favorite games at high/ultra settings 1080p or medium/high 1440p.