Rikkori
Member
It just gets boring because I already know it's a pointless argument. Happens every generation, always with the same result: people stick to their "side" & after a few years the facts bear out a simple fact - you always want more vram. Then I bring in examples of situations where vram is a limiting factor WITHOUT having tanked your performance (because ofc there's things you can do with vram that won't destory performance but do improve quality solely at the cost of vram - eg textures, image streaming, etc) by doing something stupid like play at 8K with 10 fps or whatever (eg: wolfenstein 2 uber image streaming, minecraft rtx chunks at 24, hbcc on/off tests to validate memory requirements >8 GB, Doom Eternal req>8GB etc etc), then that gets spun like it's not representative or it's a fluke or bla bla, "compression will make up for it", "ssds will make up for it", "the magic tooth fairy will make up for it" and so on and so forth. Then id's lead engine developer goes on record and says "yo, vram is dope, 8 GB is barely minimum anymore, don't skimp on it!" but somehow he doesn't know enough or whatever.Alright dude. No need to get cheeky. Yes I'm wrong about the bandwidth between the mobo/gpu but your worries about the amount of VRAM is armchair engineering. I researched it a bit more and let me tell you why your concerns are misplaced.
We've had cards for years with 10-12 gigabytes of VRAM and they couldn't do 4k gaming. Clearly that means the bottlenecks are not amount of VRAM but in other limiting factors: Memory bandwidth between VRAM <-> ROPs and ROP perf. Ampere has significant boosts in both these areas.
Yes your AMD Big Navi might have 16 GB of VRAM but that's because they couldn't get GDDR6X and so they hide their bandwidth shortfalls by playing with memory bank configurations. Does that mean you need 16 GB for 4k gaming. No.
Now let's try to think as a developer. Do you think they're throwing up 10+ GB of textures every 60 frames? IDK. My hunch is probably not because most people can't afford cards with that much memory and devs are usually not targeting the latest and greatest.
And of course, what's the point in bringing AMD into it unless you're just looking for flame wars thinking I care about them? I really don't give a shit, I don't empathise with corporations.
At the end of the day it's still irrelevant. You're not gonna change your mind, I'm still gonna buy a 3080 and game+mine the shit out of it, and 10 GB will still be pitiful and no one will remember it and it will all happen again as it has before (0.5 vs 1, 2 vs 3/4 gb, 4/6gb vs 8gb, and now).
Worst of all, within 2 months people will pretend like these arguments never even took place when Ampere gets 16GB & 20 GB variants, and RDNA goes for 16 GB as well, then the value of extra vram will be taken for granted like it was just 'common sense'.
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