Why the vram variation?

[irishbeast]

Possibly a simple question but why is it that nvidia cards generally tend to have less vram then their AMD equivalents yet cost is very similar. Are AMD cheaping out on other parts of the card?

 

Until recently I never had anything more than *gb, have 16gb now but the top AMD cards seem to always have more. I know performance is not solely down to vram but it certainly plays a part, especially when thinking about the longevity of the card. Watched a youtube video as to whether 12gigs will be enough in 2 years and opinions seemed divided. I'd like to think it will run things way beyond two years but I wonder at what point the memory will become an issue. I know there are already some games that it can't handle in 4k ultra, not many but a few.

 

Watched a video of a 4070ti essentially  bottlenecking on vram on far cry 6 ultra settings which for a new gen card is worrying and why I decided to pay more and get a 4080. 

 

 

 

 

[Bismut]

8 minutes ago, irishbeast said:

Are AMD cheaping out on other parts of the card?

Not necessarily, making a card takes a lot more than just VRAM. NVIDIA might be overcharging because they are the market leader and want to push people to higher SKUs, AMD might care more about longevity, I cannot say for certain.

[Eigenvektor]

The cynical answer would be: so that you have to upgrade/replace the card sooner, resulting in more sales. They give you just enough for now, knowing full well it won't last.

 

As for AMD, they generally can't compete at the very high end. Adding additional VRAM is one way to stand out, that doesn't cost any additional R&D or adds significant manufacturing costs.

[Levent]

Market research, feasibly, Jensen Huang. 
 

Last time I checked it would have cost me around $150 to get twice as capacity dense GDDR6 modules for my 3070. So there is probably a decent amount of difference even at manufacturer price rates. 
 

That being said, I bet this boils down to Nvidia shareholders or Huang himself wanting significantly more margin of profit per card (which would be in line with dumb as fuck pricing of all 40xx cards).

[Electronics Wizardy]

Likely amd knows there the smaller player in the market, so giving more vram is one way to make up for having less software support and name recognition.

 

 

 

AMD seems to be less efficient when it comes to the amount of raw compute and memory bandwidth for a given average fps in games. For example the 4080 and 7900xt/xtx are similar in performance, but the 4080 uses a 256bit memory bus, while the 7900xt and xtx use a 320/384 bit bus respectively. This means they can do 6/12/24/48 gb on a 384bitbus, while with a 256bit bus you have options like 4/8/16/32. Amd goes for the 50% more vram option often in a case likethis.

 

 

Nvidia seems to be outselling amd by a large amount currently, so why spend more on vram why customers buy the product with the current amount.

[irishbeast]

Very interesting responses already. I though I had missed something obvious but it would seem not!

 

I wonder what percentage of the market nvidia have. 

 

I know here in the UK today Microsoft's  planned takeover of Activision was blocked today to keep the competition fair, which is a good thing

 

https://news.sky.com/story/how-a-microsoft-conquests-interview-likely-tipped-block-on-microsoft-activision-deal-12866881

[bezza...]

its cus nvidia has so many fan boys they can sell lets face it not bad gpus very overprised. amds cards are worse gpus (less features ect) but resobaly prised. its basicly nvidia cheaping out

[Zodiark1593]

23 minutes ago, irishbeast said:

Possibly a simple question but why is it that nvidia cards generally tend to have less vram then their AMD equivalents yet cost is very similar. Are AMD cheaping out on other parts of the card?

 

Until recently I never had anything more than *gb, have 16gb now but the top AMD cards seem to always have more. I know performance is not solely down to vram but it certainly plays a part, especially when thinking about the longevity of the card. Watched a youtube video as to whether 12gigs will be enough in 2 years and opinions seemed divided. I'd like to think it will run things way beyond two years but I wonder at what point the memory will become an issue. I know there are already some games that it can't handle in 4k ultra, not many but a few.

 

Watched a video of a 4070ti essentially  bottlenecking on vram on far cry 6 ultra settings which for a new gen card is worrying and why I decided to pay more and get a 4080. 

 

 

 

 

A bit of a guesstimate, borderline talking out my ass.

 

The console GPUs have the capability to directly pull data from storage, a capability not widely used on PC. This is in addition to the generally increased RAM available on the consoles for textures and such. If DirectStorage or an equivalent is not widely used, and actually available for most gamers (meaning more stuff gets preloaded into VRAM), I'd actually expect that we should be targeting 20 GB to comfortably outlast this gen.

[SteveGrabowski0]

Nvidia doesn't want you buying their gaming cards for professional use, hence the 8GB RTX 3070 when the very similar A4000 professional card that cost 2.5x as much had 16GB. They're about to really release a turd next month with an 8GB RTX 4060 Ti that'll probably be $399 to $449.

[igormp]

53 minutes ago, irishbeast said:

Possibly a simple question but why is it that nvidia cards generally tend to have less vram then their AMD equivalents yet cost is very similar.

Nvidia is cheaping out on vram for market segmentation.

53 minutes ago, irishbeast said:

Are AMD cheaping out on other parts of the card?

No, not really, they're actually spending more money on this to try to use it as a market advantage.

54 minutes ago, irishbeast said:

Watched a video of a 4070ti essentially  bottlenecking on vram on far cry 6 ultra settings which for a new gen card is worrying and why I decided to pay more and get a 4080. 

Just as nvidia wanted.

 

Also, adding more vram to all of their GPUs would make those way too close to their professional counterparts, which is a big no-no for their sales dept.

 

43 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

AMD seems to be less efficient when it comes to the amount of raw compute and memory bandwidth for a given average fps in games. For example the 4080 and 7900xt/xtx are similar in performance, but the 4080 uses a 256bit memory bus, while the 7900xt and xtx use a 320/384 bit bus respectively. This means they can do 6/12/24/48 gb on a 384bitbus, while with a 256bit bus you have options like 4/8/16/32. Amd goes for the 50% more vram option often in a case likethis.

Keep in mind that Nvidia is using GDDR6X for the high-end parts, which are only available as 8 or 16gbit modules. So, for a 256bit bus, you cannot do 4gb, the 4080 already does 16gb, and the 32gb option is likely to be used for their "quadro" lineup. 

[irishbeast]

21 minutes ago, igormp said:

Nvidia is cheaping out on vram for market segmentation.

No, not really, they're actually spending more money on this to try to use it as a market advantage.

Just as nvidia wanted.

 

Also, adding more vram to all of their GPUs would make those way too close to their professional counterparts, which is a big no-no for their sales dept.

 

Keep in mind that Nvidia is using GDDR6X for the high-end parts, which are only available as 8 or 16gbit modules. So, for a 256bit bus, you cannot do 4gb, the 4080 already does 16gb, and the 32gb option is likely to be used for their "quadro" lineup. 

Thanks for that - what you have said makes perfect sense.

 

There's definitely a big marketing element. Suppose nvidia just don't want their cards to still be useful years down the line so you keep buying new ones. Probably is as simple as that

[igormp]

32 minutes ago, irishbeast said:

There's definitely a big marketing element. Suppose nvidia just don't want their cards to still be useful years down the line so you keep buying new ones. Probably is as simple as that

Not only that, but even as of today, if you need 48gb of vram or more, you're pretty much stuck with their enterprise offerings, which cost 3~5x more than their geforce counterparts, as already mentioned here.

 

The 3090 was already a pretty big game changer for many workstations, many researchers and lots of universities are building clusters around 3090/4090 because they're many times cheaper than a quadro/tesla equivalent (I know it's against nvidia TOS, but people still do that, so ).

[filpo]

10 hours ago, Tomberry said:

its cus nvidia has so many fan boys they can sell lets face it not bad gpus very overprised. amds cards are worse gpus (less features ect) but resobaly prised. its basicly nvidia cheaping out

for gaming amd is superior, especially with the price cuts of Radeon 6000. The 30 series (apart from maybe a used 3090) doesn't make sense

 

IMO the only 40 series SKU that makes sense is the 4090 since nothing else can beat it. But then again amd aren't even trying to beat the 4090 so its not really a fair comparison AND its 600 bucks cheaper (im talking about the 7900 xtx)

[irishbeast]

2 minutes ago, filpo said:

for gaming amd is superior, especially with the price cuts of Radeon 6000. The 30 series (apart from maybe a used 3090) doesn't make sense

 

IMO the only 40 series SKU that makes sense is the 4090 since nothing else can beat it. But then again amd aren't even trying to beat the 4090 so its not really a fair comparison AND its 600 bucks cheaper (im talking about the 7900 xtx)

If it wasn't for the fact that a 4090 would have required a new PSU, case and possibly CPU (5900X possible bottleneck?) then I would have spent the extra on the 4090.  I had to get a bigger case for the 4080 so not putting myself through that again! 

 

In terms of price/performance you are absolutely correct. I watched a lot of comparison videos prior to purchase. Considered a 3090, 4070, 4080 and 4090 but the 4080 was the best I could get without tons more upgrades.  If you have a decent setup (need a really big vase as the cards are enormous) then I would spend the extra on a 4090. I gad already gone over budget on this build so had to keep existing PSU and motherboard so that I didn't bleed money. In hindsight it would have been cheaper to buy new than to do a custom build

[AlTech]

16 hours ago, irishbeast said:

Possibly a simple question but why is it that nvidia cards generally tend to have less vram then their AMD equivalents yet cost is very similar. Are AMD cheaping out on other parts of the card?

Actually it's quite the opposite. Nvidia cheaps out on RAM and AMD tends to put a decent amount of VRAM on their cards.

16 hours ago, irishbeast said:

Until recently I never had anything more than *gb, have 16gb now but the top AMD cards seem to always have more. I know performance is not solely down to vram but it certainly plays a part, especially when thinking about the longevity of the card. Watched a youtube video as to whether 12gigs will be enough in 2 years and opinions seemed divided. I'd like to think it will run things way beyond two years but I wonder at what point the memory will become an issue. I know there are already some games that it can't handle in 4k ultra, not many but a few.

For 4K? 12GB won't be enough in a few years. You'll need 16GB for that.

16 hours ago, irishbeast said:

Watched a video of a 4070ti essentially  bottlenecking on vram on far cry 6 ultra settings which for a new gen card is worrying and why I decided to pay more and get a 4080.

If you're still within your return period I'd return that 4080 and buy either a 7900XT (similar perf to a 4070Ti without the bottlenecking) or 7900XTX (similar perf to a 4080). They both have more VRAM and are much better built cards that should last.

[Montana One-Six]

17 hours ago, irishbeast said:

Watched a video of a 4070ti essentially  bottlenecking on vram on far cry 6 ultra settings which for a new gen card is worrying and why I decided to pay more and get a 4080. 

Interesting because I played FarCry 6 at 4K maxed with the HighRes texture pack for ~70 hours without any issues. Maybe it is not about the VRAM size alone but a combination of VRAM, bus and bandwidth of the 4070Ti.

[irishbeast]

On 4/28/2023 at 2:49 PM, Montana One-Six said:

Interesting because I played FarCry 6 at 4K maxed with the HighRes texture pack for ~70 hours without any issues. Maybe it is not about the VRAM size alone but a combination of VRAM, bus and bandwidth of the 4070Ti.

How odd.

 

Whats your 3d mark score out of interest?

 

[Mark Kaine]

On 4/27/2023 at 10:03 PM, irishbeast said:

Are AMD cheaping out on other parts of the card?

the other way around,  why have expensive vram if people still buy those what are basically 2008 era offerings regarding the memory situation.  AMD has other issues but at least offer time adequate amount of vram

[Montana One-Six]

5 hours ago, irishbeast said:

How odd.

 

Whats your 3d mark score out of interest?

 

Haven't run any benchmarks recently but the latest one is https://www.3dmark.com/spy/22789527