Would 6GB of VRAM last me 5-6 years?

[ewitte]

23 minutes ago, mm_1994 said:

I've looked at benchmarks and the laptop 3060 is only about 10% slower than the desktop one. It's the 6GB VRAM that worries me.

TBH I've had issues with 10GB once upgrading to 4k but there shouldn't be any issues at 1080p for a while.  Some games are struggling at 4GB now so who knows it can be an issue in 5-6 years that is a LONG time.  3-4 I don't believe there will be any issues as its easy to reduce textures, etc.

[venomtail]

On 9/13/2022 at 8:55 PM, mm_1994 said:

Do high textures at lower resolutions take less VRAM? For example would high textures at 720p take less VRAM than high textures at 1080p? Or is the texture resolution based on the texture quality setting only and isn't affected by resolution?

The difference in VRAM usage between playing at high texture settings at 720p and 1080p will be very small. You should have a bigger difference between changing high at 1080p to medium textures at 1080p.

Whole textures are loaded in regardless of what resolution you're playing at. 

 

When it comes to rending your scene it will be more important how quickly your GPU can process the rendering rather than how much of the parameters it can store at that moment.

[Falkentyne]

On 9/13/2022 at 4:23 AM, venomtail said:

There were 3060's in 2016...?

 

VRAM is mostly for shaders and textures. Meshes and vertexes that most of the time are the ones rendering your stuff on screen take up very little VRAM, just computationally heavy. Just because you have a lot of VRAM doesn't mean your GPU is able to keep up with all the tasks of rendering. Lets create fake specs: I'd gladly take a 6GB 3070ti over some 16GB 1080ti.

And when you do start running out of VRAM, firstly just lower the textures. They disproportionally take up more VRAM than the rest of rendering.

 

Oops.  I meant 1060's.  But yes, 6 GB cards, and they were budget.

8 GB cards were the high end ones (GTX 1070 and 1080).

[Falkentyne]

On 9/13/2022 at 12:53 PM, mm_1994 said:

I'm confused, wasn't the 3060 released last year? Or are you talking about the 1060?

Yeah I meant 1060.  My laptop I bought in March 2017 has an 8 GB 1070.

[mm_1994]

On 9/13/2022 at 10:23 PM, ewitte said:

TBH I've had issues with 10GB once upgrading to 4k but there shouldn't be any issues at 1080p for a while.  Some games are struggling at 4GB now so who knows it can be an issue in 5-6 years that is a LONG time.  3-4 I don't believe there will be any issues as its easy to reduce textures, etc.

I can live with 3-4 years. I was just hoping it would last a bit longer.

[mm_1994]

15 hours ago, venomtail said:

The difference in VRAM usage between playing at high texture settings at 720p and 1080p will be very small. You should have a bigger difference between changing high at 1080p to medium textures at 1080p.

Whole textures are loaded in regardless of what resolution you're playing at. 

 

When it comes to rending your scene it will be more important how quickly your GPU can process the rendering rather than how much of the parameters it can store at that moment.

So you think a 3060 laptop would be better than a 3050 desktop even though it has 2GB less VRAM?

[venomtail]

4 hours ago, mm_1994 said:

So you think a 3060 laptop would be better than a 3050 desktop even though it has 2GB less VRAM?

I would get a 3060 over 3050 yea. To my knowledge laptop models are a bit lesser than their desktop counterparts but even with that I'm pretty sure a laptop 3060 is still better than a desktop 3050, that's just a terrible card for the money.

My 5600XT has 6GB of VRAM and I can't recall a single game that didn't have enough memory and I've played a ton of games recently on max graphics, from Stray to Cyberpunk 2077.

 

By the time 6GB of VRAM start to become the bottleneck an 8060 will be out.