In the elitist sphere of PC gaming, it's either maximum settings or nothing. Once in a blue moon when there are no new releases to cover, tech channels do their token videos on how lower settings can still look good, and then when the new hardware releases come along, they carry on pretending that anything less than ultra settings isn't worth getting out of bed for. Back in the real world, we just turn the textures down a bit and live without VRAM-heavy things like ray tracing, and then we enjoy playing the damn game because we didn't buy our gaming PCs to run art exhibitions in our own homes.

What's scary is that the norm of "8GB is new minimum" has been set in motion now. I have a feeling it might happen more and more as developers will use that in order to spend less time optimizing. Less and less backlash with time, more and more recommendation for higher VRAM cards. Basically, this will become the new DLSS/FSR that is already the reality. Less optimization, less FPS but hey! Just toggle FSR right?!

I think the real argument is that people who buy cards at $400-$600 expect to max out modern games at 1080p for several years after their purchase. With the 30/40 series cards the limited vram amounts make people really mad that they would have to spend $400-$600 to not even max games out at 1080p. This is the way I feel about the situation, anyway. When I bought my 1070 I played everything at max at 1080p and I bought that card for $360.

its not how big your vram is its how you use it.

“Giggle-Byte”

giggle bytes?

Us old guys remember when a game had to work when you bought it, because it was on a CDrom or DVD and patches were a real pain. Now, games are released in basically an unfinished state, and you get a new patch or update every time you start it. Not cool. Makes everybody frustrated.

The moment they put 12GB VRAM as a minimum requirement to play that PC game is the moment I stopped buying modern PC games & just straight to emulating PS2/GC & Wii/OG Xbox games.

I just keep praying to gaming god that we don't go beyond 8GB for 1080p gaming in the coming years, it doesn't make sense honestly.

Good lord, you *bought* Gollum? Talk about taking one for the team!

Optimization plays a big difference between games and esports titles in particular

I still remember Last of Us initial release version running at 1080p fsr quality (which basically at 720p) and it eats up 6-7gb vram 😂, 6gb vram for 720p textures is just absurd, i'm glad they managed to fixed the problem though

Today I discovered that a Gigglebyte is an actual term for an unspecified but stupidly large amount of storage. You learn something new every day. When it comes Hogwarts Legacy I can get a fairly steady 60fps on a Ryzen 3 1300X, GTX 970 (4GB or 3.5GB of vRAM depending on who you ask), and 8GB of RAM on my Media PC. Now to be fair that is with a lot of Low in the settings and use of the Balanced FSR 2.0 preset. The game still looks good though and runs well. People really just need to temper their expectations and their settings to the hardware.

Unless you're knee deep in VRAM, jack every graphical setting to Ultra settings, only touching the hungriest VRAM eaters like Textures, Reflections, Tessellation, Shadows, and more recently Ray Tracing But I guess that's the arguement being made, "I don't WANT to tamper and test, I just want Ultra preset! I bought the game, I want to use ALL the game!"

Thanks for revealing this to me. I've been debating on a gpu because of the vram talk. Seriously thanks man.

I think the overall takeaway from this is if you have 8gb vram rn then there is no need to worry. However, if you are upgrading for a gpu worth more than 300 USD, you should definitely be looking for at least 12gb because you obviously want the option to run on the highest settings on a new mid range plus GPU.

As someone who had a 1080, and graduated to a 3090, then popped a 980ti into my old system. I’ve discovered that yes, 8gb is pretty much the needed amount these days for high settings, but it’s more than that in my personal testing. It looks like it’s also the bandwidth of that RAM. The biggest issue with the 4060 is that they pulled the bandwidth back hard. The 8gb is fine. You’re correct that there are way too many high profile games coming out that are poorly optimized. A well optimized game can use high bandwidth of 8gb just fine. That RAM isn’t processing the graphics, it’s just holding the data for the GPU itself. If that data is bloated and dirty, 8gb may not be enough, but I really think it’s that bandwidth bottleneck. Good video and I’m glad that more people are willing to call these multi-million dollar games coming out poorly optimized.

I am surprised this LOTR Gollum game hadn't come out in like 2008. It feels so out of time today, with merely performance issues revealing when it's from.

Testers use ultra setting to benchmark, so you are showing to maximum potential performance of a product and to make sure you are testing on a level playing field. Most of the testers do say they wouldn't actually play at those settings depending on the hardware and game. It makes sense to test with the same setting to show scaling and the relative performance of each product. Personally I normally set games to medium and then set texture quality to as high as my VRAM will allow, as that normally give great performance along with good image quality.

Don't buy a Gigglebite with only 8 Gigglebytes

Hit the nail on the head with this one.. GG's Bro.

The point is, you can buy $500-$600 Nvidia cards right now, that struggle to play the latest games on high settings. In this situation, forget about RT too. That is crazy, and shouldn't be excused. Or, you could have bought an AMD cad for less money, and get 12-16gb, giving your card an extra 3 years playing on high. Thank God I went 6800 instead of 3070ti.

I think the problem is now due to GaaS, since it doesn't matter if they can launch it before and then they will fix it later, that ends up in the lack of optimization by the developers to meet launch dates by companies that the only thing that what matters is to make a profit (which is totally normal, but it is not justified that it should release a junk product) and also that political ideas are being involved in the industry in part (as much as they want to deny it, the evidence is there)

MLID spoke about this recently. Games development takes roughly 3 - 6 years to make. 6 years ago the top tier card was the 1080ti which had 11gb of vram.. Game developers assume that 6 years later 11gb vram will be the AVERAGE amount of vram at best! Once their game is completed They couldn't predict that gpus are coming out today with 8gb..

they should have said 6 gb vram is not enough, which is maybe more factual if you think about it

Steam survey says 81.45% use 8 GB or less of VRAM. Only 2.98% of gamers have a video card with more than 12 GB of VRAM. Therefore, 83.94% of the video cards sold that are over 8 GB, are not much above it, such as the RTX 3060 or RX 6700 XT. Please notice that 81.45 and 83.94 are essentially the same number. Gamers who had to get new video cards, laptops, or build new desktops in the last few years -- even those who had a little higher budget to work with -- kept pretty much the same outlook as they had with the computers they used before. Performance and features are great, but price rules.

i use a 1200p 60hz monitor, 8gb is gonna be fine for a good while for me, specially with new modern games being pretty boring.

My 3070ti bought last year was a terrible investment but then again, i shouldn't be worried for newer games, either i play it or not the main pupose is to have fun, therefore lowering the settings to high mixed with other medium will be sufficient enough to have an enjoyable experience. I think we are over saturated with games that require more vram but in reality we also need to take account of what we have, and enjoy it until it dies out and we're back to square one shopping for the best gpu that fits to our needs and budget.

I honestly believe these big name reviewers like linus tech tips, hardware unboxed, jay2cent, and much much more have not been honest for a long time. I don't call their "reviews" as reviews because just a a glance you can see if their sponsor doesn't pay them well enough they still do it but they either treat them like pure trash for not paying them enough and when they do they worship the ground they walk on, or they just simply try to push bad products/services onto their viewers. This also continues into their "partners" and based off jays2cents video on asus it only comfirms what I found out even more that they review products they are partners with and have established backdoor practices to push these products. This means their paid for product promotions IE reviews the companies have even more influence than ever. It makes me question the legiamicy of their bench mark tests, the products they get could be higher tier products than what the actual consumers get as many of the times from the looks of tear down videos even the dye sometimes is different with GPUs as shown in gamers nexus whom I have questioned the legimacy of his content for years and been highly sceptical of as he has basically shat on 6700xt and then gone back when yeston "gave" him a card to test and reviewed that one much much much overly wealmingly positive. Hardware unboxed as soon as that Nvidia tried to pull their graphics cards them and some of the biggest youtubers flipfloped and it is clear to me that nvidia manipulated the reviewing community as all of them collectively crapped on the 6700xt and newer AMD cards and then would hint that cards like the 6600xt is much more worth it than the 3060ti after crapping on it like AMD didn't pay them enough or the threats from Nvidia were so great that it influenced their reviews so heavily and collectively. The fact that these "reviews" are infact paid for product promotions and the fact they get the products for free there should be disclaimers within the reviews and they should stop calling them reviews, as everything they do is actually illegal in the states for not declaring them selves as a paid for product promotion when it is, and when they get the products for free, which is every video almost. When ever they have to pay out of pocket for a product they seem to crap on the products. This goes for game reviewing as well as many other fields but the more I find out about the reviewers process the more I find its unethical. They seem to have a high influence on the market as when I went to go buy a athlon 3000g for a minimalist build I ran into issues from the microcenter employee and when I bought the 6500xt for the same build later on all I got was yelled at by the microcenter employee who was litterally quoting reviews by linus tech tips and I told him I don't really care what he thinks this is a upgrade from the APU graphics of a athlon3000g. The employee from when I bought the 6500xt was litterally just calling all amd cards trash garbage with problematic drivers after quoting linus and was out right refusing to even sell me the 6500xt, I had to get another employee to get the card for me out of the case, I never saw that temper tantrum linus tech tips fan boy at that microcenter again after that. The other employee told me he acts this way every time someone tries to get any of AMD cards and he tries to sucker them into Nvidia cards and he tries to get people to buy the top end cards. If you can see them manipulating the thought process of microcenter employees you can also see them manipulating the market through various means through these influencers. TLDR: Reviewers are corrupt read above to find out why I think that way. PS: I agree with your analysis that it is a optimization issue. I am somewhat a game developer although I have not worked on a game in almost 10 years and a lot of these AAA game devs cut corners especially when they use premade engines, certain APIs/libraries, and frameworks that do more work for them in a more safe zone but is heavily less focused on optimizations when it comes to allocation to make sure developers don't do dumb things and then complain. Ontop of that a lot of those Api's, lirbary's, ides, and frameworks have A LOT of grabage data, code, unused functions, dead code, and some of that is actually causing issues. I can comfirm from my dev expeirence that optimization is commonly thrown on the back burner and sometimes optimization isn't even possible with certain engines as they heavily lock them down at the points where it matters. Unreal engine 4 comes to mind when talking about this.

What's the display resolution? If you're at 1080p or 1440p, it's understandable. But for 4K, 16GB is a minimum for optimal performance. I did a test myself on Forza Horizon 5, on an RTX 2080 Super 8GB VRAM, switching from 1440p to 4K, I instantly got a message saying it's running out of VRAM.

Screw unoptimized games if those don't run on my PC with 4GB of VRAM I won't buy any ! 😂 One day perhaps I would upgrade to 8GB but so far I'm happy with it !

Anyone notice that these shopping channels which is what they are always say "just buy it" which keep prices high, they never mention the obscene prices of monitors & have loads of expensive childish bling in the background.

And........ this is the reason why "tech" Tubers with 500K+ subs get only 8000 views in each of their videos after A WEEK! People have had enough. Hey man, nail to the head, excellent - excellent video! 👍👍👍👍

Thanks tech enjoyed that I understand now🤓can I ask what overlay program you use for monitoring?

Bro I just came across your channel, and really enjoyed a couple of your videos! I'd like to know your opinion on a situation I'm rn. I'm rocking a 2060 6gb, and want to upgrade my gpu...I was looking for a 4060ti 8gb, but after such negative opinions online, I'm second guessing myself. What are your thoughts on this GPU? I'm leaning towards the 4060ti, cuz the Power consumption is low, and I'm not really in the mood to change my 500w psu rn LOL (otherwise I would go for an amd card). Since I'm on a budget aswell, the 16gb variation doesn't quite fit my budget.. Do you think the 4060ti 8gb, can have a solid 1080p gaming experience 60fps, for the next 3/4 years?

You're right, but the problem is that you cant enjoy when a game comes out or that let alone weve moved from 4gb to 6gb to 8gb its that you want to future proof your buy! Games are gonna start using more v ram thats what they mean!

Thank you for this video - it's evaporated so much of the FUD I'm dealing with rn having to choose between a 12GB 3060 and an 8GB 4060. 4060 it is!

The way you say "gig-O-bytes" is hilarious.

Hundreds of highly rated PC games from 2000-2016 that can run on 4GB -8GB cards.

Why must these GPU manufacturers and game developers turn my computer into their personal den of lies?

You got a sub. Optimization is the issue 85% of the time if not higher.

I love it sounds like he is saying giggle bytes, love it

I have a problem with this though. my windows install, due to configurations and software I use for production, is constantly using vram and about 2gb min at that, my 3070 was crashing or stuttering a lot with a few games because of that. having a clean install optimized just for gaming does not showcase what most users will experience.

Want to hear something funny? These low-end cards (xx50 and xx60) of 8 GB are aimed at 1080p and when playing in 1080p you do not have enough pixels to see the textures in ultra (probably not even in high), so it is not only that there is almost no difference in the textures in raster, but there is no difference when playing in these resolutions in which these GPUs are focused. Under exceptions that are a bad optimization or decision on the part of the developers, as an example of bad optimization we have in this video the 'The last of us' in which you can see how after the optimization patch, even configured in low, the texts are clear. And a bad decision of the developers is for example that in the 'shadows' setting if you change from medium to low, the shadows of the other objects are directly eliminated instead of lowering the resolution of the shadows or using some optimization method (this is also noticeable with the Ray Tracing and with the Path Tracing since by lowering the settings to these you are not doing something that affects the image).

Hi TD, I don't think anybody with an 8GB card needs to upgrade just because of the vram. And I am a dedicated Medium settings player. I'm not going to get angry either way, but I would prefer lower price for the performance in the current generation mid-tier cards.

Guess my 1 Gig-OL-Byte gpu wont cut it anymore then. At least now I know that 8 will do me fine, thanks! I subbed just coz you said "thanks for clicking on the video" and making me feel special.🥰

Thanks for another great video, mate! I purchased Jedi Survivor just to see if it would run on my GTX 1060 6 GB build. And it runs perfectly well. Low settings and a bit of FSR ofc, but still looks great on my 4K TV. Would love to see that 1050ti 4GB vid you mentioned making.

I used to think no gpu would ever need 12gb vram until I started getting into AI and high resolution textures

I do remember I bough RE 4 Remake almost day one and it run great on high with my mobile 1660ti, it just blew my mind how it was optimised indeed .

The only way I’ll be satisfied about this issue is if I see the vram usage of those same games on the ps5/Xbox series X. If it’s way lower than even the recent patches, I’ll stop worrying😂

I get your point, and it is correct that games need to be better optimised at launch. I do find your video useful for most people still, as steam stats shows most players still have Full HD screens. But Full HD is on the way out and not a small amount of people are already playing at higher resolutions. So as you briefly mentioned, at higher resolutions you need more VRAM and from experience i can say that when playing at 4K in a projector you will also want to enable higher texture quality otherwise they will lack detail and defeat the point of playing 4K. The marketing of the latest cards is also responsible for the players expectations and demands. In the RTX3000 series the marketing was pushing a lot the idea that the cards were 4K gaming cards. Strangely now, the 4000 series seems to be marketed for FullHD instead. And then there is Ray Tracing . It is being marketed heavily and it is beautiful, and it is clearly being used as a selling point. But enabling such feature will also demand more VRAM. So all in all, I do not think it is unreasonable to ask for more VRAM than the cards from half a decade ago for people that are looking to invest on a card for the next 5 years again. (I have a RTX2080 which has 8GB). Do I have a point also? :) Let me know what you think.

the marketplace has to reject poorly optimized games. it is bad for everyone if 16gb vram and frame generation become the new bar for entry to this hobby

3070 is a 500usd card and its not low price card in any means and it struggle in some games after only 2years despite a lot of ppl talking about how is 8gb vram will be obsolete soon they continued with there decision to use 8gb, so ppl complaining is a valid 1. also about the cards prices and inflation why this problem isn't there in the CPU market? while you get good performance increase with a slight increase in price

Man and people were starting to convince me that my brand new card with 12gb was going to be dead in two years. Saying I should’ve paid $200 more to get a 16gb card that is always sold out where i live lol. Thanks for the video and the peace of mind.

I tested Hogwarts Legacy at 4k max setting NO RTX, I was getting 12gb. With RTX ON it's about 14gb. So at 4k your system would crash. 1440p would be slightly less but you be pushing it and would see crashes every once in a while.

Giggle Byte 😂 love it man!

I have three PC´s here at my Home. For a long time i study this PC think way ago from gaming and youtube and can say, EVERTHING is just a question of attitude. ;-) Do never care about what you have, just care about, what you can do with it. :-)

Amen! Well said!

I played Uncharted with my 3070 without any issue.But I cap the fps at 100 because it is enough for me. I hava a question too, what is the spec of the pc you use for the benchmark?

Well argued and defended.

So where does igpus stand in all of this

It's all about the game consoles. Until new consoles are released, the new requirements for most games will be somewhere between 8-12GB at most.

Once in a while we see a game well optimised for all settings, shader stutters , memory leak , these are all we getting.FH5 personally i feel best optimised title of late.

The big tech youtubers are talking mainly to hardcore gamers who like to build "money is no object" machines, it feels like. Funnily enough, the GTX 1650 is still the top GPU used on the steam charts. So either the tech youtubers are right or the consumers are saying something totally different. To be honest, if a game can't run on a modern GPU 6 or 8GB VRAM, I just won't play the damn game. I still think you should do a blind test with some Dweebles to see if they can tell the difference between medium, high and ultra.

Basically medium generally has started having as much geometry and detail as high had 2 or 3 years ago (cough Cyberbug cough). All being on a (now) lower tier card means is once the game has been optimised correctly you're restricted to image quality that used to be maxed out settings but now there are settings with even more detail most of which you won't notice in motion, great for pixel counters and benchmarkers but make no difference to the gaming experience in the vast majority of cases. Oh and obsolete? So for the half a dozen (if that) AAA boredom simulators that are releasing each year they will increasingly struggle as time goes on but you have a library of games stretching decades your "obsolete" card can run like an absolute beast, old stuff at 4K, less old stuff at 1440P and recent and new stuff at 1080P. The mugs are the people who obsess about maxing out everything, they spend more time benchmarking than playing and more money on the hardware than the games.

I don't think 8gb cards are the problem. $400 8gb cards are. Under $200 8gb is fine.

The game and PC detects how much VRAM a GPU has and it compensates for it. I play on a 1650 Super and it never uses more than 3800 VRAM of the 4000 available. I do play at 1080P Medium settings.

Thanks mate you are the best!

It really sucks that 8go isn’t enough, thank god that I kept my 3.5 go 970, i’m sending my 3060 ti back right now 😢 In all seriousness, as a weekend warrior that been playing the last 2 years with 3.5 go, I think that I can live with 8 for a few years

At what resolution though? If you never play above 1080p then 8 will cover you in nearly every circumstance for a while yet, you could probably get away with 4-6. 1440 is a crapshoot with 8, but I've had nothing but headroom on my 6700XT's 12g. I'm sure 12g can do most games up to 4K. You definitely aren't wrong about the optimization, nothing comes out with any kind of optimization anymore. I've grown very tired of paying $60 for what is essentially a beta release.

coming from someone who had a 1660 super with 6gb of VRAM and couldnt play the new COD without extremely inconsistent frame rates on LOWEST 1080p settings, it is a VRAM issue mostly, not entirely but mostly. PS5 and Xbox Series X have 16GB of VRAM so new games are pushing there VRAM limit in order to get the most of the new consoles, the sudden increase of VRAM usage will go down once the consoles get to 4-5+ years old but as of right now having 6gb of VRAM is not enough if your playing AAA games

I could be ignorant but doesn’t vram requirements scale with resolution? In which case the 8g criticism is valid particularly for gpus aimed at 1440p like the rtx 3070?

This whole discussion is around high settings on 1440p+. Are the games you tested 1440p / 4K?

"GIGGLEBYTES"

I was confused between rtx3060ti and rx6700xt ,they both cost same and performs same (amd being a bit faster in raw performance) , i went with rx6700xt only bc extra vram seemed like more futureproofing at 1440p . Do u think I've chosen poorly?

You are missing the point. Some of the recent releases have quite nasty texture quality if not on high, so that cuts smaller VRAM cards. On top, if some generations before you could use the system RAM to provide backup, now GPUs come with x8 or x4 slots, so it is not fast enough and we get the pop-in problems. Moreover, if you look at 2060 to 3060 to 4060, even the perf improvements are very bad. This is to the point that a 2060 12GB to 4060 isn't really much to talk about. Nvidia is wasting silicon on features that could be used to improve perf. While previously it may have made sense to have a bigger cache and less VRAM bus, on 4060 this is a complete failure due to lack of VRAM and monitors moving to 1440p - which now takes a bigger hit.

Do u suggest buying a more expensive rtx 3070ti 8gb over a much cheaper rtx 3060 12g? And play TLOU on high settings instead ultra.

I have 4gb of vram and i have no problem

Thank you for teaching me the word giglebyte.

Good points but I have to disagree the console are the standard for game which has 16gb ram, then the games are ported to pc

Ofcourse it's not only about VRAM, but things are changing now, games are not optimized and engines are even worse, so when it was not about VRAM in the past, it is pretty much about VRAM now, because when game in 4K occupies even more than 10GB, it's not really ideal when you have GPU with onl 8GB. 17 years ago, you had mostly 2 options - DDR2 512MB and DDR3 256MB and better option was that faster one, not bigger one, even Crysis from 2007 is ok with just 256MB VRAM. Today engines and games are joke. I wish games were normal again, not like it looks the same as 10 years old game, but you need 5 times more powerfull computer for no reason. In the past, amount of VRAM was growing faster than what games actually needed, today GPUs should have at least 16GB as standard.

The testing was made @ 1080p ultra, 2k ultra. You tested @1080p high! When you pay 600$ for a rtx 3070 ti you expect to play @ 2k ultra! 3070 ti was advertised as a 2k gpu...

everytime u say gigglebyte my heart smiles

Feeling a bit hopeful about my 3070, after hearing a lot about 8gb Vram is dead these days.

gotta have those giggle bites.

8gb should always be more than enough, these devs are getting lazy

You should do cpu core count next.

Is 12 GB vram enough for 4 k ultra to high settings

Yup.

Here i am with a 2060 going into Starfield like 😬😖

With The Last of Us, the RAM usage scares me more. A very low percentage of users (less than 25%) has more than 16 Gb. I don't have that either. Ram is not always easy to upgrade.

great video. but it feel like its part 1. part 2 is required with 2 and 4gb vram included for more closer look ;)

8gb vram is fine for now but I'm worried if it will be fine 2 or 3 years later because i upgrade my gpu after at least 3 years

All this talk about giggle-bites and giggle-hurts, it makes me realize that I need to invest in more aspirin and bandages.

they should instead tell AAA studios to stop releasing games before they hit the polishing stage

You are correct sir. Just because a game has ultra settings does not mean you HAVE to play at ultra to enjoy it.

the big question is who is the people who put money in shares to make money , i do hope you guessed it, it is blackrock ,they want your money so bad that when new gpus come out they want you to buy them . games can run on 8gb vram but they tell the game developers to set the game for a high vram so that you can purchase the graphic card at a high price and make more money . That why they really do not like you to use mods on new games.

I have a RTX 3070 in my computer and an Ultrawide monitor. I tend to keep the graphics settings of the games I play at medium and they look great and run perfectly fine with "only" 8gb of ram.

I have a 1070, it has 8GB of vram. It has ended up being a real champ for future proofing as this has been the first year where it truly struggles. (I thank fsr for giving it added legs) I want to upgrade, plan to get a laptop since I also need a new one of those too. The 4070 mobile is the highest gpu I can get in the model I want, it has 8GB as well. That was future proof 6 years ago, now it is the minimum and shouldn't be in midrange cards at all. It works for now, but will it still work moderately well in 6 years like my 1070 does now? Thats why I hesitate to buy now, despite the Asus Flow x13 being what I've always wanted in a laptop. It won't hold up years down the road.

1080p + Anti Aliasing + Medium Settings @ 60FPS does not need two dozen teraflops or 16 GB VRAM.