Why You Shouldn’t Buy a GPU with 8GB of Video Memory

It is no surprise that buying a GPU with 8GB of VRAM means losing performance in many games, with 12GB being the minimum required. This is not a hypothesis, and now YouTuber Hardware Unboxed has tested the VRAM consumption after analyzing 12 games. These games were analyzed at different graphics quality and resolution. And yes, in most cases, 8GB of VRAM is not enough even to play at the lowest Full HD resolution. We must remember that a year and a half ago Epic Games pointed out that
GPUs with 8GB of video memory are obsolete.

As the resolution increases, it also increases. VRAM Memory Requirementsbut that’s the least of the problems. Move on from resolution From Full HD to Quad HD (1440p) increases video memory consumption by about an average of
1 GB. Now make a jump Full HD in 4K (2160p) already implies jump from 2 to 3 GBBut that’s the least of the problems, namely that in any Full HD game, when you crank up the graphics quality, you’ll find that your 8GB of VRAM creates a performance gap.

GPUs with 8GB of video memory have performance issues in many modern games.

Honestly, the point of Hardware Unboxing is that I wouldn’t buy a GPU with less than 16GB of VRAM. But of course, that’s only used in high-end GPUs, which are expensive. Therefore waypoint – 12 GB. 12 GB will save you from problems with Full HD and Quad HD resolutions. Now there are games for 4K that They consume up to 17.3 GB of video memory. with the highest possible quality. There are even 4K games with medium/high graphics settings that already require 12.3 GB of video memory.

Having mentioned some of the most popular games, we have
Cyberpunk 2077. This is not a game”modern“as such. Despite this, 1080p resolution in ultra quality consumes 7.9 GB of video memory. (8.2GB at QHD and 9.4GB at 4K) Now if we enable ray tracing, we’re good to go. up to 11 GB of video memory (11.9 GB at 2K and 15 GB at 4K). At maximum graphics quality, Cyberpunk 2077 will consume 12.3 GB of video memory
(13.4GB at 2K and 16.4GB at 4K) In this particular case, a GPU with 8GB of VRAM, no matter how powerful, would not be able to push this game at maximum quality at 1080p.

A more modern game Ratchet and Clank: Rift. At 1080p resolution in medium quality it consumes 8.1 GB of video memory; 9.2 GB in high quality and 10.1 GB in very good quality.. At maximum graphics quality, we are talking about 12.4 GB (versus 13.3 GB at 2K and 14.4 GB at 4K). Originally designed for the PS5 with 16 GB of video memory, it is obvious that for a GPU with 8 GB of video memory, the image quality must be reduced.

On average, at maximum quality, all 1080p games require 10.7 GB of video memory.

This makes it clear that GPU with 8GB of video memory
At the moment it is possibility to avoid if the budget allows. And in 1080p, in the highest possible quality, The game that consumes the least video memory is 7.3 GB. compared to 15.6 GB for the most demanding game. This means that with a GPU with 8 GB of video memory, it is almost impossible to play at the highest possible quality.

This is more, these 12 games they need to be configured medium/high quality so the average VRAM consumption is 7.2 GB. With high quality, this consumption on average becomes 8.2 GBWith the same average value, you can add 1GB of additional VRAM for 2K resolution and up to 3GB of VRAM for 4K.

This means that in the case of NVIDIA we will have to choose at least one GeForce RTX 4070In AMD’s case it will be Radeon RX 7700 XTOr, of course, choose older versions to save money. This also leads to poor aging of GPUs like the RTX 3070 Ti, with 8GB of VRAM.