once again... tons of misinformation
- 4 gb vram gpus are still plenty for nearly almost all lastgen games with optimized console settings
- rx 480 surpsased 970 because of having a slightly better architecture. 970 still remained competitive in terms of performance against the 1060/480/580 even after 7 years. some games benefitted so much from polaris that there were (some) instances were rx 480 even outsurpassed a 1060. it has nothing to do with polaris having higher VRAM
- gtx 970 still provides aproximately 2 times perf. over a ps4 with equivalent settings in rdr 2 and is able to ultra textures in that game (to me, peak of lastgen is rdr 2 and if that GPU is gracefully handling the RDR 2, it passed the longetivtity test, even with its wonky 3.5 GB fast+0.5 gb slow vram configuration)
- 10 gb vram should be plenty for 1440p-4K+no ray tracing. consoles will have a graphics memory budget of 8.5-10 GB depending on how complex the game's systems are
-8 gb vram should be plenty for 1080p high + 1440p optimized settings for a long time
12-16 gb vram will be required for nextgen textures+ray tracing. 3080, 3070 and co. won't be able to handle ray tracing+nextgen textures at 1440p/4K in future titles just like consoles. consoles will probably have to abandon ray tracing in favor of nextgen textures. naturally, same will apply to 3080 users (nothing wrong with it. you have to adhere to your budget limits)
metro exodus enhanced edition uses 8.5-9 GB of graphics budget at 1440p-4K (dynamic). even its updated textures are pretty outdated. imagine pushing actual ultra definition high quality textures into that game, VRAM usage would be around 12-13 GB and all of a sudden consoles cannot run it, and all <12 GB RTX GPUs are getting destroyed.
current console and rtx gpu memory budgets constraint the usage of nextgen textures alongside with ray tracing. even then, consoles' ray tracing performance is pretty bad and should tell you that there's no valid ray tracing for its future. its clear that;
They designed consoles with no ray tracing in mind. If they wanted to push nextgen textures+ray tracing, they'd give them 24-32 GB VRAM budget. They didn't give a care about ray tracing, if it were so, series s would not exist. Its a literal console that can only allocate 4-4.5 GB of VRAM to games. That's a serious implication. That box has to run games all the way to 2028.
You either go full ray tracing in nextgen or it just becomes a "from time to time" fantasy like Metro Exodus. Series S and other consoles having a very limited GPU memory made sure that Ray Tracing will be a fluke on consoles.
Now you can argue RTX 3070 3080 are capable of RT much better than consoles, but yeah, they will also be severely limited by their memory budget. But truth is, nextgen games are going to be so demanding, running RT will be out of question for both consoles AND those GPUs. I get literally 1080p 55-60 FPS in Cyberpunk with ray tracing on my 3070. that's jawdropping. game's base optimization is pretty bad. but nextgen games will actually be that tough to run. not every game will be a walk in the park for systems out there. adding RT on top of an already demanding game is brutal for performance reasons. you can get away with sacrifices to framerate or to resolution with DLSS and stuff, but core problem stays the same.
nextgen ray tracing will be more useful to rtx 4000 series with plentiful of VRAM but also PLENTIFUL of raster and RT performance. having plentiful vram but lackluster rt performance like 3060 is not cutting it either
