How much GPU Memory do you REALLY need?

all right so with a lot of the lower end graphics cards now making their way to announcements i would say store shelves and maybe your computers but let's face it we know that's not happening [Music] i bet that's what i sound like they're not making their way to your systems or your retail shelves or e-tailers warehouses because they're gone already but we're going to talk about the 60 series graphics cards and more importantly now with the 6700xt announcement we're going to talk about ram and the amount of gp ram that's available on these cards and whether or not it's a gimmick why there's as much as there is and is it a figure that you really need to consider while you're shopping hypothetically for your new graphics cards next year the all-new 5000d mid tower airflow case from corsair features an optimized front panel for maximum ventilation while the integrated cable management and tempered glass side panel means you can show off more of your components and not your cable mess to see the full list of specs and to learn more about the 5000ds flexible fan mounting options perfect for both air cooling and water cooling enthusiasts follow the sponsored link in the description below all right so i don't have a 6700 xt here yet but one of the things that you've probably noticed with amd is almost every one of their graphics cards in the 6000 series just has 16 gigabytes of vram now amd in the past would give you dual skus for each card let's say you had a 5700 xt uh i believe this was actually still the case hypothetical okay fine rx 480. you could get an rx 484 gigabyte or an rx 488 gigabyte all the numbers were the same in terms of the stream processors and uh rops and all that the only difference was the amount of ram on it but as we move forward now it's really started to get really weird in the like i call that that that general market which being the 60 series cards for nvidia and the lower amd ones the names are all kind of weird now right let's talk about ram so the 3060 has 12 gigabytes of vram which made a lot of people confused myself included as to why they would put 12 gigabytes giga i almost said giga rams 12 giga rams on a 30 60 and 8 gigabytes on a 3060 ti the 2060 if you recall had 6 gigabytes of vram but the reason why i call this extremely confusing is if we go back to the 10 series which is what nvidia is actually comparing all the 360 numbers to because they never compare it to the previous gen they always compare to the gen before that because that puts you closer to about a four year cycle which a lot of people tend to upgrade every four to five years so you can kind of see what the every other generation improvement is which is affecting more people than annual upgrades this was the geforce gtx 1060. this was the first one that had launched this is a six gigabyte card as well then they came out with a cheaper version which was also a gtx 1060 but this is a three gigabyte card but don't be fooled we already did a video calling this one out it had less cuda cores and less everything making it not really a 1060 and just a really shady marketing move from nvidia on this one but three gigabytes of vram as you guys know today would absolutely not cut it so if that's the case why does the 3060 have 12 gigabytes of vram and the 3080 has 10 gigabytes of vram well the way that the ram is actually allocated has everything to do with the bus width you got 128 bit bus you have 192 bit bus 384 and something we haven't seen in a long time 512. and you'll notice that these are increments right the reason why it has 12 gigabytes of vram is because they would have had to have been stuck with either 6 or 12 because of the 192 bit bus they wanted to go with a wider bus giving it more memory performance and also allowing them to be able to go with a number higher than six if they were gonna go with either a four or an eight gigabyte variant they would have had to reduce the memory bus width down to one hundred and twenty eight gigabyte gigabits well 128 bits that's a lot gigabits that's a lot of bits they would have had to drop it down to a 128 bit bus which would have then allowed them to be able to run eight gigabytes of vram but with a narrower memory bus they would have had lesser performance as well but i just wanted to kind of respond to that real quick uh because it is a response i received from nvidia when i talked about it being just a memory allocation circle jerk between amd and nvidia and who has the most ram we know amd has the most ram but one of the things for today's video is actually going to be how does that ram actually affect your gaming experience we know that six gigabytes of vram these days in 2021 with modern titles is probably not going to cut it which means it makes sense that they went with the 12 gigabit or gigabytes versus the six gigabytes if that's the uh limitations they were going to have on the 192-bit bus see when it comes to memory performance it's not just how much of it do you have that's just the size of the container now imagine the size of the container has an opening at the top and how fast that memory can get in and out of it is going to depend on two things one the size of the opening being your bus width and then two how fast that information can get in and out of that bucket being your pump speed or in this case the memory speed itself so we have faster memory now a bigger opening and a bigger container which theoretically is going to give you much better performance than if you had a smaller container with a smaller opening with the same size pump and when i say same size pump it's all gddr6 which is going to give you very fast speeds but if the fast speed is filling a smaller container that takes longer for it to cycle then that can then you can see there why those three figures can start to play in as to why they chose 12 gigabytes on the 3060. uh the reason why amd is pretty much putting 16 gigabytes and everything is because they're kind of using the same bus for everything so i think it's a little bit simpler over there but they're not directly comparison apples to apples in the architecture that's something we already know so what we're going to do is we've got our 3060 loaded up on our test bench here and the reason why i'm doing these tests right now to show you a lot of people get really hung up on the amount of vram that's in a card on making their buying choice if they and the reason why i even brought up these 10 series cards is because if you were sitting here let's say hypothetically these are 360 cards and you go oh i could save some money by going with a less lesser amount of card but it's all the same well you're going to see right now that although we have 12 gigabytes on a 3060 some titles are not going to utilize anywhere near that and some might get somewhat near there but what you're going to find on the 360 as well is that you have a bit of a surplus when it comes to the amount of memory one other thing i want to point out is even the 10 gigabytes on the 3080 unless we're doing 4k gaming with high resolution texture packs on super modern titles do we see it go anywhere near the 10 gigabytes of vram it's uh it's nice to have remember it is gddr6x which means it's going to be a faster memory and it's not only how big is the container and how big is the opening how big is your pump which is the speed um the pump matters as well you have the biggest opening and the biggest container and if you have a slow dribbly pump it's still going to suck right use that metaphor however you want all right so we're gonna do right now is we're gonna use afterburner here to kind of show you guys some specs and what's happening with the card uh that way we can sort of um give you guys some real world experience here or i guess examples of what's happening what we're looking at here is a couple of different things this is our gpu temperature that's the usage of our gpu this is rise of the tomb raider the menu is actually a 3d rendered item which is why it's at 100 this is our core clock this is our memory usage in megabytes now remember this is a 12 gigabyte card so as you can see in the menu we're only using just under two gigabytes we're going to change a couple settings here uh i'm starting with some older titles we'll move our way to some of the newer more demanding titles like borderlands 3 stuff like that to see if we can't get our usage to go anywhere near the 12 gigabytes because what i'm trying to show you here actually is that eight gigs is really the sweet spot and anything above eight gigabytes is pretty much going to be overkill which to be honest i'd rather have more memory than i need because having not enough memory means you have to lower either your resolutions or your settings to get your uh memory under control now one of the biggest factors of the amount of memory that you use are not just the settings but the resolution at which you're applying those settings to specifically stuff like msaa or any sort of anti-aliasing that is uh any sort of scaling anti-aliasing so let's go ahead and take a look at some of the settings here this particular test we have a custom preset everything is pretty much as high as it'll go the resolution which we're running here is 1080p yes this is an ultra wide panel you can see the black bars we have it set to actual 1080p i'm going to go ahead and set this to 1440 right now because i'm curious to even sitting in the menu that's even in the menu we saw about a 200 megabyte jump in terms of usage but i feel a lot of people that are going to be running 60 series cards are probably going to be on 1080p or 1440p panel which is perfectly fine um i'm going to run this up to ssaa or super sampling anti-aliasing 4x and you can see that added just a little bit of that we're almost at 2400 megabytes of usage again just in the menu now if we jump this up to 1440 or that almost three gigabytes of vr now what's funny is this title existed at the time the 36 the 1063 gig did as you can see we're using almost the full amount of frame buffer in this graphics card in the damn menu so you can see why we were pretty mad about the three gig ever even existing back in 2016 2017. one thing you might notice too is as the game is loading you're seeing the vram actually start to load as well yes this is the very beginning of the game but as you can see we're already at six gigabytes of vram so had they chosen going with the six gigabyte option rather than 12 gigabyte you could see how in an older title like this even in 1080p without maxing out things like anti-aliasing we would already be pretty damn close to that but one thing to keep in mind when it comes to memory though is just like your system memory is it's not going to just automatically climb to whatever arbitrary number it wants to pull the api knows how much vram is available to it and it's going to dynamically start to adjust things to try and keep things underneath where it would crash if it goes beyond the available vram it's going to crash so the biggest sign you're going to notice of not having enough vram is going to be major stutters major pauses in your game because what's effectively happening here is the video card is going to start sharing memory with the system now having to go through the pcie bus to the system memory which is significantly slower than vram and then storing that information and then accessing it again through system memory rather than to the disk is what those pauses are you're actually seeing the pause of that transfer taking place and let's face it you'd rather have it take place on the graphics card natively what's funny is the way that it's it's so locked in right there at that 61.19 it's not really like it's not moving even one megabyte while we were loading the game every single texture file every whatever the game engine needs oh we went up one is stored into the vram and so having enough vram available to it or what you hear referred to as a buffer is obviously very important so let's just go to 2x so that was a couple hundred megabytes four x this is the highest setting we have for this title which again remember is like five years old now at this point almost five years old so we're up at just under seven gigs so we're only using i mean about 65 of our ram which is good um again 1440p on a 60 series card getting us probably around 60 fps so here if i had to make a guess not terrible so as you can see you're getting way more ram than you need in this particular title but again this is not that new of a title games like this that have these areas that load as you saw when you're loading the game it loads in everything into vram as much as it can the api goes oh we got 12 gigs available to us we only need about 7 500 to get this done we'll just load it all that way it's not having to load anything while you're playing however sandbox games uh get like battle royale type games have very big worlds um tom clancy type games that have very big explore explore areas as you move through the map various areas of the map are going to load as you're going so if you have enough vram to load as much in there as possible and have it be fast enough to where it can do it while you're gaming without causing any sort of stutters that's where you'll start to notice having too little of a vram buffer can really start to affect your gameplay experience all right so this is borderlands 3 this is just the opening tutorial mission it's not using that much vram actually phil and i both expected to use more vram than that but what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and just switch it to 1440 in the middle of this gameplay uh we've been kind of keeping an eye on it and it hasn't really even tried to load more memory it's just really surprising us to be honest so 1440p i hardly used any more nope so this is just one of those titles that doesn't seem to really be all that demanding at least when it comes to vram so we were using just under 4 600 megabytes um in the actual game at least in the opening part i think it might get a little bit more demanding but i think given how low that number is right there i think it's safe to say we're probably not gonna get anywhere near even eight gigabytes in the benchmark all right so it jumped up to 5140 uh but again it's not changing at all during the test because well there it is right there we're thinking that the benchmark here might be loading elements from all over the game into this one area and that's one of the reasons why you're seeing the the actual number increase but remember this is 1440p which is gonna be for this card and this resolution the biggest uh amount of demand you're going to see from memory in this particular title not even using half of the amount of vram that is available on this graphics card so again showing pretty promising numbers that if this was an eight gigabyte card that there would be plenty of vram even eight gigs all right so we're using wildlands now because it's more of a sandbox world but you can see we're getting an obvious glitch here with our on-screen display as it's loading um clearly it's funny you can actually see it loading as it goes it's so neat to watch okay so as you can see again very low memory usage put your freaking guns away too many civilian casualties okay i was expecting it to use more vram than this oh god oh god [Laughter] looks like my room when i was in high school all right so i guess wildlands is not one of those titles that really has an issue all right so this is control but the lss is on and the reason why i have it on is the fact that the dlss has to fit in the frame bumper frame bumper frame buffer as well i'm not very far into the game but look here we are again still right around that 4 000 4500 mark as the fight's going on though the buffer usage is like kind of going up slightly all right so let's do the fight again in 1440p and see if we go above 5100. so what i did right now is i actually turned off deal it turned off turned off no turned off dlss so i could run it at the native 1440p that last run actually was 1440p but now we don't have dlss on so there's a little bit of an fps hit but as you can see not too much has changed so yeah fps has definitely suffered a little bit we're at uh just about 50 percent of our vram usage here yeah not even not even 50 of our vram usage so if there's anything that i wanted you guys to kind of learn or take away from this video it's just the fact that vram count is only one portion of what makes a good graphics card a good graphics card now there's no doubt the 3060 is a very fast graphics card it's fastest 60 series card we've ever seen it's got more crew decor it's got more rt cores more tensor cords it's got dlss it's got ray tracing capabilities you can see 1440p in a game like control uh you couldn't see the fps i could tell you it was running at least 60 fps and we're not even using half of our frame buffer at least in the titles that we showed here now new games like watch dogs legion uh our watchdog legions we're seeing reports of it being like more like eight gigabytes closer to eight gigabytes of vram um wolfenstein youngblood can see as much as like eight or nine gigabytes of vram which shows the obvious reason is to at least why brands like amd and nvidia are using more than eight gigabytes on their newer cards um given as titles become more demanding uh resolutions get pushed higher that's another thing to keep in mind people are running higher resolution panels now more people than ever running 1440p it's quickly catching up and going to surpass 1080p in the next couple years in terms of the dominant panel resolution um but don't get caught up in just that number i've seen people say well this card's better because that's 16 gigs of vram but again if it's 16 gigs of vram and it's slow ram uh then you're obviously gonna have a problem there as well there's there's just more to it the amount of vram what is the bus width what is the speed of the ram and then can the core utilize that ram it's it's easy to get caught up in some of these numbers and not understanding the way that they all work together as a system and i think what we've shown right here is that uh eight gigabytes of vram is truly the sweet spot but one of the things you can keep in mind with the amount of ram that's on graphics cards today is it's about future compatibility because if you're running a a four or five year old graphics card like a 10 series 1060 even a 6g you can see some of these titles would start really leveraging that even though the fact that the core itself wouldn't be strong enough to necessarily run these titles in 1440p to where you would even be able to utilize that level of frame buffer the core speed itself would definitely feel more dated than the vram but having a fast core like you have on these new these new graphics cards giving you a higher frame buffer available will make you that much more relevant farther into the future so you can play newer titles as the card starts to age before feeling like you have to upgrade your video card so this video has proved or served any sort of purpose it's hopefully showing you that there's more to vram than just the amount of it but we have a question for you guys what are some titles that you have seen that are just extremely dependent on the amount of vram in your graphics card not system ram but vram heavy so sound off in the comments below what some of those titles are the resolutions and the settings and stuff that way we can try and recreate some of those uh scenarios where we can do some future testing ourselves and if you have any other questions about your system uh whether it be system ram cpu or gpu or you'd like us to do more videos like this where we kind of go in depth a little more showing you guys the way certain things work uh we would like you guys to sound off with the way you think uh in the topics that you think we should cover so as always everyone thanks for watching and we will see you in the next one no one likes you anymore 3g card 800 bucks you guys 800 so if you want it sound off down below

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 910,016

Rating: 4.926847 out of 5

Keywords: gpu memory, video card memory, video memory, how much gpu memory do I need, how much memory do I need, how much vram, how much vram do I need, how much video card do I need, vram, gpu mem, memory overclocking, gaming memory, gaming vram, gd6, gddr, gddr6, 2060, 3060, 3080, 3090, 6700xt, 6700xt vs 3070, 6700xt vs 3060, 3060 vs 3060ti, 3060ti, 3080ti

Id: 6vuFU_EF-38

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Marakk1234]

The latest two open world games with ray tracing, ones that might qualify as being next-gen, both use more than 6GB VRAM at 1080p, making even 2060 underperform in both, despite DLSS.

[u/[deleted]]

There will be the question of allocation vs usage. Maybe a good way to test would be to create a ramdisk to block off a portion of the VRAM in increments for a given card and then test comparative performance against full available VRAM.

I didn’t watch the vid, because JayZ, but he probably didn’t do anything of the sort.

[u/Sniper_One77]

Then there is Asus, who just confirmed RTX 3050Ti 4GB (for their laptops)

[u/mansnothot69420]

And that's without raytracing enabled.

[u/where_art_thou_billy]

Cyberpunk 10gb at 2k.

[u/moderndhaniya]

You can always download more vram.