How much VRAM do you really need?
PC hardware trends upward over time. This is a well-established fact from the past four decades of home computers. Whatever you have now, you should expect your next PC upgrade to offer more: more performance, more memory, more storage, more features. Moore’s Law suggested that we might get a doubling in capacity, performance, transistors, etc. every few years, but things have certainly slowed down over the past decade. What does that mean for our modern graphics cards?
The first consumer GPU to ship with 8GB of VRAM was AMD’s Radeon R9 290X back in late 2014. That was the upgraded model; the original R9 290X (and 290) ‘only’ came with 4GB. Nvidia didn’t join the 8GB club until late 2016 with the GTX 1080/1070 launch. Seven years later, we’re at the point where 8GB feels very much like a budget-focused configuration.
And yet, rather than moving forward, the latest generation of graphics cards seem to be treading water or walking back VRAM configurations, particularly on the Nvidia side. RTX 3060 came with 12GB, yet here we are with the RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti walking backward to 8GB configurations. Many gamers are now wondering how big of a problem that is right now, and what will happen going
