In recent years, demand for VRAM has literally exploded! This demand coincides with the arrival of ray tracing in video games, which is more demanding in this respect. Techspot is conducting a little experiment to find out how a graphics card with 4 GB of memory now performs compared with one with 8 GB.
4 GB of VRAM is clearly not enough right now!
For their comparison, our colleagues based themselves on the little RX 6500 XT, which offers two memory configurations: 4 GB and 8 GB. While memory capacity has changed, the GPU characteristics remain the same: 1024 stream processors and a 64-bit wide bus.
Of course, the rest of the configuration holds its own, with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and DDR5-6000 RAM!
To say the least, 4GB of memory is currently insufficient. On games such as Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the results are obvious. If the game runs at low quality, with textures at low levels, framerates vary very little between a 4 or 8 GB video memory configuration. However, the 6500 XT 8GB is more at ease, with fewer FPS drops. However, when setting textures to Epic, the frame rate drops sharply on the 4 GB card: 35 FPS versus 45 for the 8 GB version… Not to mention the fact that RAM usage increases: 23.1 GB vs. 21.9 GB.
On Last of Us Part 1, the findings are the same: 46 FPS on average with textures in low, 31 FPS with textures in high, still on the 4 GB card. 8 GB of memory delivers better visual quality: 51 FPS in low vs. 50 FPS with textures in high.
This scenario is repeated on almost all games. Some lighter titles, such as Dying Light 2, do not pose any problems, simply because the game consumes no more than 4 GB of video memory. Our colleagues obtain similar results between 4 and 8 GB cards.
In the end, the lack of video memory forces us to lower the quality of graphic details or risk seeing the framerate drop… In addition to increasing RAM usage. What’s more, 4 GB of VRAM is completely insufficient these days, and under certain conditions 8 GB is already a limit. In the near future, it won’t be surprising to see cards like the RTX 4060 with 8 GB facing the same problems.
Moral: avoid 8 GB cards wherever possible, and especially avoid 4 GB cards (fortunately, 6 GB seems to be the minimum)… Unless you only play CS2.
