How Much VRAM Do Gamers Need? 8GB, 12GB, 16GB or MORE? 

as Nvidia marketing team expert i can say 6gb is enough in 2024

This shouldn't even be a discussion. VRAM is cheap, but sold to users at a huge premium. VRAM amount should *never* be a bottleneck for gaming, but because of greed, it is. Having spare VRAM is fantastic. It improves the longevity of the GPUs by enabling users to run newer games, on lower settings - but keeping textures and whatnot high, at little to no performance cost. It keeps the hardware usable for longer, which obviously isn't in Nvidias interest. So they limit the amount, to ensure that we keep on upgrading, even though we otherwise wouldn't need to. They're generating E-waste for the sake of profit. It's a version of planned obsolescence.

Nvidia marketing RT as the future of gaming and DLSS as the saviour of gamers, while also selling cards lacking the VRAM needed to run DLSS and RT.

Planned obsolescence.

I can't wait for $500 usd 8gb next gen cards! Let's go

RIP 3080 10gb . GPU performance would be still enough , but the vram is just too small now .

So DLSS frame gen uses Vram... VRAM that Nvidia doesnt give you at the mid-low range cards. thats a hell of an upsell trick lol.....

People need to keep in mind, higher texture quality is the easiest way to increase graphical fidelity. It has the most impact on how nice your game looks. And with sufficient VRAM it has basically zero impact on your performance. This has been the case forever...and I don't understand why the average person forgot this.

remember that the video is about current requirement, usually people buy for the next few years at least.

Nvidia VRAM professional says 6-8GB is more than enough until 2030 so buying an rtx5050 ti, 6050ti and 7050super ti with 4-8GB will be worth it at $400 to a fairly maximum price of $500+

nVidia: Please buy our GPUs to play all these *totally* efficient graphics-arms-race games with our RTX features and frame-gen! Also nVidia: What do you mean you need VRAM for that?

As a 3070 Ti owner.. I am still annoyed at Nvidia's decision to only include 8GB on this card. It had so much more potential. Definitely feeling regret buying this..

Not only did the 1070 have 8GB of VRAM, it was double that of the 970!

32gb RAM and 16gb VRAM, recommended balance on gaming PC 2024.

These tests revealed something new for me. Frame generation is actually bad for anything below 16gb VRAM. Which means both of the main gimmicks of RTX cards ii.e RTX and Frame generation are only good for high end cards.

Graphics card from 7 years ago (1080ti) having more Vram than 2024 cards is criminal.

Forbidden West DLC would make you drop down to medium on 8GB cards

I was supposed to buy a RTX 4060 TI 16gb then luckily I've saved some $ to the other part then upgraded it to rx 7800 xt. I'm happy with my very first pc build 😊

Everyone talking about how bad the 4060 was at $400 for 8GB, but I think the 4070Ti at $800 for 12GB is far, far worse. Imagine spending $800 and you have to turn textures down after only a year, and turning DLSS and/or RT on gets you stutters. Yikes. Also, just got my 7800XT today, upgrading from an RX 5700 8GB. What a time to make a VRAM video! :)

As Steve mentioned at the end: 12 GB is bare minimum, 16 GB the go-to. I'm good with my RX 6800 16 GB :)

Wow, very informative data and charts, I'm blown away. I really appreciate that you tested different graphics settings at different resolutions. When VRAM problems are brought up, I always thought "meh, you can just play on High settings anyway, it looks the same with higher FPS" but now I see some games use more than 8GB even on 1080p Medium which is the lowest settings that you would use on a new graphics card. It's criminal that you can pay upwards of $400 and play on 1080p Med, and still experience frame drops

This story is nearly 20 years old. Problem is not JUST the RAM but the BUS on which it is operated. Back in DOOM 3/Quake 4 days manufacturers have started slapping cheap DDR (NOT GDDR3 which is the 1st DRAM specifically getting the G in its name to differentiate it from standard DRAM) in bulk on low/mid range GPUS. I remember the 1650 NON XT with 512 MB DDR LOL - slow DRAM on 128 bit BUS ..... the card could never fill it up properly. I have a feeling if the market and MINERS weren't a factor HBM would have been the way to go, AMD/RADEON as usual tried to push the industry in right direction regarding G-RAM but at the totally wrong time.

And now you know why I don’t do bar charts in my tech reviews and testing. I identified the hogwarts texture pop in a year ago in my channel High fps is nice and all…. But when your game turns into a ps1 title and pop is everywhere…. Who are you impressing

Wish people started giving some attention to the ridiculous hardware requirements of AAA games and their lack of optimisation whenever this conversation takes place.

Imagine paying $600+ for only 12gb vram 🤯

I feel bad for all the mugs who've bought the 8GB 4060 & 4060ti. Looking at the Steam survey, that's no small number either! The 4060+4060ti accounts for 4.96% (2.73+2.23) and while there's sadly no discrimination between 8GB & 16GB versions, I'd wager heavily that, due to prebuilts, 8GB cards make up the overwhelming majority. On the flip-side, the RX 6700 XT+6750 XT+6800 account for only 1.31%! (0.74 + 0.35 + 0.22), and mid-tier RDNA3 cards don't command enough marketshare to even register!

With 8GB, 12GB and 16GB cards being mainstream you can expect low settings soon to be fir 8GB cards.

So wtf is the point of the 4060 then!? I recently bought a 3060, but was considering the 4060. When I found only 8GB options, I decided to go for the 3060 12GB and spent the savings on more system memory.

I‘m so happy I went with team red for my last GPU upgrade. The 20 GB on my 7900 XT seem to be more than enough, even in the most demanding games at 4K. I also purchased it at its all time low price.

I think it was Digital Foundry that said that Avatar manages textures based on available VRAM so it would make sense that its trying to use a lot of it if there is enough available. So VRAM usage should vary depending on what GPU you use.

Finally a comprehensive video on VRAM usage in games. I wish you have had added a comparison of VRAM consumption when playing with the 7900 xtx and the 4090 as both have 24 GB of VRAM. I always hear that "20 GB VRAM in Radeon GPUs are equivalent to 16 GB VRAM in Nvidia GPUs". I would only believe it if someone like you shows a side by side comparison.

There's something comical about 4060 Ti 8GB buyers getting the card for the ray tracing and framegen, only to have those features not work properly because a lack of VRAM.

those poor souls shouting 8G of vram is enough 😂

2016 to 2024, 450 becomes 600. About a 33% increase. I don't make 33% more :(

4060ti 16gb sometimes costs more than 7800xt, what gives? Are people that dumb?

nvidia pulling an apple move charge a ton for more memory - genius

Biggest visual flaw with a 4 year old game was limiting textures to 8gb for 1080p should tell you all.

The reason why I didn't buy the 4070 Ti was that I found it unacceptable for its price to have only 12 GB. This was later corrected by the 4070 Ti Super but it didn't exist when I was buying. So I settled for the regular 4070 which is fine for what I play and decided to keep the extra money and put it in a future upgrade.

I prefer games that try to optimize texture usage when memory is not enough rather then just completely tanking performance, but it would be great if they showed the player this is happening. Something like a flashy warning message (toggleable of course) during gameplay saying your VRAM is not sufficient and settings have been lowered or whatever. This way people would understand they have this problem instead of wondering why sometimes the game looks a bit worse and not even thinking of putting the blame on the GPU memory.

Wait until Nvidia releases 5070 laptop, again with 8gb for the 4th year in a row.

For games with mods I almost use all 24gb, others most iv seen is close to 16gb @ 4k

I have a 4060ti with 16gb VRAM and I paid £420 for it and it has been brilliant. I play games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Hogwarts Legacy with no issues at all. I could have bought the 8gb version of the card and saved £60 but I would have not been happy with that version so I decided to get the 16gb and I love it. Great video Steve. Well done.

I regularly play Cyberpunk on my RTX3080 10gb at 1440p with DLSS quality and RT high, and I have very few issues. It is rare when I notice a downgrade on textures due to performance, very rare.

The allocation is important too, as the game is able to cache the textures in vram for when they're needed. This may work ok pulling them out of ram, but usually those with a video card lacking sufficient vram aren't rocking a monster cpu and the latest ram.

After watching Black Myth: Wukong gameplay footage, I will consider 16 GB of VRAM GPU because I want to maximize the setting for that beautiful graphic

8GB isn't even enough for 1080p anymore... I wish companies would stop trying to sell that as "more than enough..."

The BUS width is what puts me off the Nvidia cards, I'm not paying $1000AUD for a GPU with an entry level 128 or 192 bit BUS.

Eye candy and frame gen using over 12gb isn't looking good for 12gb boys including myself with 4070.

Can't wait for the 5090 8GB.

A "methodology video" in how you measure actual usage would be SO NICE. Allocation vs usage is always a hotly debated topic, so laying it bare for all to see would end a lot of debate.

I have played around 10 hours of last of us part 1 last week with pretty much maxed visual quality, the texture streaming rate set to "fast". It ran flawlessly on my 4060 (little bit oc applied ) at 1080p native. vram usage was mostly around 7.5 gb. 60 fps almost always, rare dips to 50+ fps in some very specific random spots but thats not due to vram. All these vram fearmongering needs to be scrutinized by consumers and not fall into the trap.

It's insane that something like the 3070ti is already becoming outdated. That should not be a card that requires you to already be at the point of turning down settings/resolution. The 4060 shouldn't even exist.

Hopefully AMD keeps their larger VRAM buffers on their new "mid-range" cards and they show benefits longterm.

NoVramIDIA. On top of everything they started to sell 70-class GPUs in 80-class boxes for 90-class price.

Great summation of this subject matter. I really appreciate the effort you put into this. Very imformative.

I have 20gb in my 7900XT, and I can tell you personally that it is NOT overkill for VR. There are many VR games that can get close to maxing out on using that VRAM. For regular gaming yeah probably, but I'm using a 5120x1440 super-ultrawide and some more graphically intemsive games do use more than 16gb of VRAM. 20gb is just really nice to have.

Random guy: Vram makes the card more futureproof Nvidia: 6GB it is....

would be interesting to see how much dlss upscaling decrease vram usage

The new bar chart edges and font look great!

I have a 16GB MSI 6800 XT running at 1440p. It was released in October 2020. When I bought it new in January 2021 there were games then that maxed out the VRAM. More, and more games are maxing out the VRAM as well. I can go beyond overkill on system RAM, but VRAM has been perpetually in "short supply" sicne the onset of personal computing. In fact the #1 reason I go with AMD GPUs is because they have more VRAM than NVIDIA at/near the same price point. I don't care for Ray Tracing. Yes, I know AMD struggles with RT but NVIDIA GPUs barely hold it together on their own. In fact much of technology that we take for granted today, such as antialiasing, anisotropic filtering, (and others) used to be huge resource hogs as well when they were very first implemented. It took several generations before those features had little or no impact as we see today. RT is a resource hog and needs several more years to cook before it reaches performance parity. Those other features we take for granted didn't take this long to achieve stable performance.

Being a person that doesn't mind turning down the quality a bit, I'm so happy I chose a 6750XT with 12GB for a 1440p monitor.

Since I play a lot of VR. VRAM is by far the most important aspect for smooth non-hitchy gameplay. if I play HL:Alyx, even at "high" texture quality (not even "very high") running at 5400x2700 my Radeon RX6800 utilize 14.5GB of VRAM. Before when I had an 8GB card I always had stutters. Same goes for flightsims, like DCS, even without VR you easily breach the 12GB boundary with highest texture quality landing somewhere between 13-15GB of VRAM utilization.

hey guys, amazing video!!! 👍👍👍 I watched almost every video of you but I never saw a 4k ultrawide monitor in a 21:9 aspect ratio? It would he a HUGE help if you could tell me, when we can expect such a monitor???

Great video, the vram usage is really impressive and important, if you are building a new pc and want longevity you need at least 16gb or more vram particularly if you are using 4k or QHD.

i feel like shortly, (2026~) gamers will likely need nearing 16Gb of GPU memory which is pretty lame for a majority of people.

I have a 7900 XTX so, 24 GB of vram, and I've seen some games use up to 18.5. Avatar Frontiers of Pandora for example (amazing looking game btw). I would say more RAM the better. But 24 for now is more than plenty.

So far I’ve had no problems with my 10gb 3080, playing ultrawide. Even Cyberpunk runs nicely.

This is exactly what i've been saying on many AAA discussion pages on steam. People complaining about stuttering, but refusing to believe its their 12GB buffer on their 4070. Or for that matter, Nvidia's weak DX12 driver with CPU overhead. But I also know, these people will buy a 5070 and the cycle continues. C'est la vie. I have seen Forbidden west use up to 14.5GB on my 6800XT, but that was after extended playing.

I predict the 7900XT is going to age particularly well from this generation with its 20GB of VRAM. The 4080 outclasses it in raw performance, but that extra VRAM will probably keep it performing consistently for at least one extra generation over the 4080 if I had to guess

Everyone building or buying a gaming pc should see this video first. I would not go below 16 gb in 2024 in a new system. Also why are gaming laptops dumbed down with low vram a 16 gb laptop costs a fortune. Anyway this was a really interesting watch

It's not about how much I "need" it's about how much I "want".

I upgrade my GPU about every five years, and I game at 4K. I need all the VRAM I can get. I went from an RTX 2080 Ti 11GB. I'm now using an RTX 4090 24GB. It really depends on the resolution and how often you upgrade your hardware. Some people will use the same old GPU for many years. I still see people on Steam using an RX 580 8GB. That's crazy to me. It's so old now. Not everybody plays the latest games. It helps to have a lot of system RAM for when you exceed dedicated GPU VRAM. I would be in the red playing Resident Evil remakes at 4K ultra settings with the RTX 2080 Ti and the games still ran fine. My laptop has a mobile RTX 4070 with only 8GB VRAM. The Last of Us Part 1 glitched out in a strange way with white light all over the place and then crashed. You definitely want more than 8GB for 4K ultra settings for AAA games. Laptop chips are too cut down. I prefer desktop gaming.

Thanks for solid content Steve! I have 21:9 ultrawide monitor and wondering how much VRAM usage would 3440 x 1440 resolution take? Should I aim for 4K results for my VRAM requirement?

I feel like 8-12gb of VRAM does just fine in 1080p. But 1440p and 4k will definitely enjoy having 16-20gb for max settings.

Incredible job, thank you so much!

Thanks for this review. It is helpful deciding what should I buy next that suits my needs. We no longer need the fastest in everything. My only problem was with the video is that rgb backlight, the constant color change was unpleasent for me, so I scrolled down a little bit and only watched your hands doing the talk. That is your fault. :)

Most people on the steam survey have 8 GB VRAM GPU’s.

All these high quality textures increasing VRAM usage only to get blurred by TAA, DLSS, and FSR, it's shameful.

Minimum today should be like 12gb or preferably 16gb. If youre buying new card. But even older 8gb cards (20 or 30 series) are still fine if you drop down some settings.

Great content as always, Steve 💯

Back in 2020.. people told me to buy 3080 (10GB) over RX 6800XT (16GB) because RT is better I skipped 3080 & bought RX 6800XT, which perform slightly better than 3080 (Rester) In 2023.. People say 4080 (16GB / 256-bit) is better than 7900xtx (24GB / 384-bit), especially in RT.. & again.. I skipped their advice Bought 7900xtx & gave it a small Undervolt/OC it's already destroying 4080 in every benchmark (RT off) Would be funny to see how 4080 will bottleneck in fps spiked appear in 2025 or 2026 in some new games Lol.. even the 5080 rumors saying it's only 16GB.. will be fun to see brand new high-end card $1200+ with 16GB in 2024/2025 Lol

Welp. Rough week for my 1080 to die on me, but at least I now have some data to tell me how much lube I'll need when I start browsing those NVIDIA shelves

“VRAM or graphicscard memory has been a hot topic over the past few years” is so true. VRAM was crucial when I was looking to get a new GPU last Christmas, but it wasn’t even a consideration when I got my PC about 4 years ago.

I personally would like to see all cards that sell above $400 having 16GB of VRAM or more. Thumbs up for great videos and answering big questions!

So not only that frame generation is a gimmick that ruins the quality, but it also uses lots of VRAM in order to achieve the bad quality. Wow what a great feature. Not.

Would love if you tried revisiting the rtx 3060 vs rtx 4060 to see how the vram affects them

Great video! Thank you for the professional explanation. Another aspect to consider is the cost of GPUs from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel with 12GB, 16GB, etc. I was surprised by AMD's pricing and VRAM amount when the RX6000 series was released, especially compared to the RTX3000 series, which mostly had 8GB, in terms of longevity. Nowadays, I would personally prefer a 6700XT/6750XT.

Thanks for the video! I personally am willing to duke it out with the settings menu to get the most of my previous-gen 8GB card. I think it plays most games pretty well on my 1080p60 display. I haven't found upscaling or framegen to be worthwhile on my machine. Nor am I impressed when I turn on Ray Tracing. Just give me good art direction, physically-based lighting isn't necessarily artful. I could see why gamers with a higher-res and higher refresh rate display would want more VRAM. It definitely appears to help there. If people are willing to test settings a lot, and willing to toggle off some graphical bling, there's less need for VRAM. Old cards will do okay. But it still limits us more and more in the newest shiny AAA single-player games, that much is clear. (I happen to like older games. So I'm gonna be alright for a long while with this card.) Nvidia is still clearly segmenting their product stack really inappropriately, IMO. I get they have the leverage and they can get away with it. Doesn't mean it's the right move for the ecosystem. Maybe individual gamers don't have much chance of organizing a boycott. Too many people just buy what's available. But I wonder how long until game devs raise a stink about it? Maybe even Microsoft and Sony will get mad about it if they feel developers are holding back to serve the budget PC market, where the majority of PC gamers are? What's it going to take? And I know the answer why Nvidia does this (under-deliver and over-charge, don't give consumers an inch more than you have to or it'll hurt current/future profits. The usual yada yada.), but it's still pretty greedy and pretty gross to hold back the whole industry due to being greedy and cheap. I hope Battlemage and the next (or next next?) AMD generation can bring the fight to Nvidia. Intel is kinda tempting as someone who wants to stream due to their solid video encoder chip. If they sort the "running games well" part out, I will have to really consider them over Nvidia. For anything where encoding doesn't matter, AMD seems like the good choice, IMO. Upscaling, Ray Tracing, Framegen, none of those interest me much. For basic "get gaming done" workloads, AMD is clearly the perf/dollar champ. If AMD gets power usage under control, they'll be more appealing to me. We'll see. In honesty, I'm holding on to me 30-series Nvidia card, which I bought used, for a long, long time at this point. I don't like the greed, and there's nothing much new that appeals to me. The rest I can run on this thing just fine. Best to you all.

I think this whole vram panic is very profitable for gpu makers. People are willing to give them more money and go for higher-tier gpus because they have more vram. I think both Nvidia and AMD are motivated to keep this going for another generation.

So my next card will need at least 20Gb, got it. Thanks for this, it's surprisingly hard to find somewhat accurate information in terms of VRAM consumption.

Nice video! Just in time for my Summer 1080p GPU upgrade.

I have been using 4GB of VRAM with my R9 290X. All games play very fine. We shouldn't take everything for granted.

i still got rx 580 4gb, and i just stoped buying games, coz there is no end to it. buy anything cheap and play what your system can play....fuck them all

Already playing quite a few games on ultrawide maxed out and they need more than 16gb vram, and there will be more and more of them, so I am really happy I went with the XTX instead of 4080.

The 4060ti comparision is the perfect example for the idiots that say "yeah but the card it's not fast enough to need more vram, the gpu will limit you before anything else" while they leave performance on the table because the gpu would be capable enough of higher performance but vram maxing out cripples the framerate.

Dope video. Thank you

It's Gigabytes Used not Gigabyte's Used

I dont know if HUB knows but some aRPG games consume a lot VRAM at ultra settings example Diablo 4. I had 6800XT before upgrade that has 16GB of VRAM. At ultra quality preset @ Ultra wide 1440p resolution (5,120 x 1,440) game needed more than 16GB with windows included (2 monitors). So game was stuttering and i had to lower to high quality. Now with 7900XTX 24GB game runs smooth using bit over 17GB VRAM total with ultra preset

Love this topic. I can so relate, coming from the low end of integrated graphics as a youth, to my first GPU 1060 3gb (prebuilt 2016) to 2024 4090 with a few GPUs in between. I kind of like the 8GB-16GB GPUs also in my collection feel like the 1070, 7800XT, even 3060 have their uses for certain games/resolutions. Am sure I ran out of vram on that 1060 3gb, it was so bad in certain situations.

So 12gb video card is the starting minimum🤔🤔 That RX 6700XT or 6800XT maybe the one i'll look in to 🤔🤞