The amount of VRAM is crucial in order to have greater visual capacity on our PCs, a greater quantity means being able to use larger image buffers and therefore higher screen resolution, higher quality textures, etc. But especially the fact of choosing a model with one amount of VRAM or another not only affects the price but also the life time that your graphics card will have.
One of the questions we ask ourselves when buying a graphics card is how much VRAM is necessary to enjoy both games in optimal conditions, and not only games, but there are applications that require optimal amounts of this component.
Why don’t PC GPUs have more VRAM?
One of the things that GDDR memories allow, whatever their type, is the so-called “clamshell mode” in which two memory chips end up sharing the same data bus, for example in GDDR6 memory this mode is called x8 mode since in it each channel goes from 16 bits to 8 bits, this allows to place two memory chips and increases the storage capacity of the VRAM, but the counterpart is that it does not increase performance, since it does not increase the width band by using both the single chip data bus.
Doubling the number of memory chips also means doubling the cost of the same, but it is a waste of time for graphics card manufacturers to do so since the games that exist today do not allow to use these enormous amounts of memory. For graphics card builders, adding more memory than is needed in today’s games.
On the other hand, it is in the professional market where this type of configuration is necessary since large amounts of memory are used for professional rendering.
Is 10 GB enough for VRAM?
When the RTX 3080 appeared on the market a few weeks ago, the controversy was served by the fact that a few games to run at 4K required an amount of VRAM above 10 GB . But the requirement in this regard is not the same in all games, so we cannot make a generalization due to the fact that a few games require a specific amount of memory.
The reason for this is that GDDR6X memory at the moment is only manufactured in densities of 1 GB , there is no doubt that in a few months the RTX 3000 Super with GDDR6X memory that has twice the capacity will appear, but NVIDIA has had to make the sacrifice of ability in exchange for speed.
AMD, on the other hand, makes use of GDDR6 memory in its RTX 6000 , while with GDDR6X the chips that are available are 1 GB, in the case of GDDR6 it is where the 2 GB chips are available to mount them in graphics cards. It is precisely the side of AMD that is giving importance to the amount of VRAM due to the fact that it is a metric in which they have an advantage.
But if we look at it in perspective, 10 GB is not a low figure , we must bear in mind that Microsoft‘s Xbox Series X, which is a next-generation console, allocates about 10 GB of its GDDR6 as VRAM. Well, it is a console and has cuts in certain elements, but it does not have the bandwidth of the GDDR6X, which is one of the differentiating factors in terms of performance.
SSDs to increase the amount of VRAM
Thanks to DirectStorage it is now possible to use an SSD disk connected to the system’s PCIe lines to serve as additional memory for the graphics, of course the GPU cannot work directly in this memory.
The trick is to store a portion of the VRAM to unzip the content of the SSD on the fly , leaving the rest of the VRAM for the image buffers. What this trick allows is to increase the capacity of the VRAM, but it requires that the game be prepared for it.
And what advantages does it have? Imagine that you leave an area to enter another that you are approaching, while this happens all the textures and information of the next area are preloaded from the SSD to the VRAM. The enormous speed in bandwidth of the NVMe interface allows data to be changed at a very fast speed, avoiding load times and making the VRAM virtually have a much higher capacity than that provided by its memory modules.
Little by little, games will ask more and more that people have an NVMe SSD connected to the PCIe ports , something that already happens in consoles where the 10 GB allocated for the VRAM of the Xbox Series X does not fall short thanks to the Integrated SSD as standard. The same happens on PlayStation 5 and games are already beginning to ask for an SSD as a minimum requirement that, when used well, can make graphics cards with little VRAM memory be compensated.
The resolution you play at influences the amount of VRAM required
The requirements regarding image buffers change depending on the resolution since the number of pixels varies with it . That is why graphics card manufacturers assign different amounts of VRAM depending on the resolution , something that video game creators also do, who give minimum and recommended requirements depending on the resolution at which you are going to run the game .
So unless you have a 4K or 2160p monitor, you shouldn’t worry at all about the amount of VRAM on your card and even under that resolution there are only a few games that have demands above 10GB of VRAM. On the other hand, the interest of video game developers is that the greatest number of people can play their games, so these games are adapted to the hardware that people have at the time of being released for the mass market.