The video memory of the graphics card has become a really big topic in recent weeks (we also devoted a separate article to it). More and more games make relatively high demands on it, and it is starting to be said that many of the issued cards simply do not have enough capacity anymore. YouTube channel Moore’s Law is Dead in the latest episode podcast Broken Silicon invited a developer who works in Unreal Engine 5 as a guest and appeared here partially anonymously only under the first name Dave. The talk was not only about AI or ray tracing, but also VRAM.
The interview is very interesting and I recommend listening to it in its entirety. Anyway, I would point out that, according to Dave, the increasing demands on VRAM are not caused by poor optimization, it is said that creating a game for an 8GB graphics card is so (not only) time-consuming today that it is not even worth doing, because the studio does not have so many resources and needs to focus to other aspects of development. The resulting situation is supposed to be the result of more advanced textures or geometry, but also other new technologies that take up part of the video memory, for example lighting with Lumen.
The developer claims that the requirements will definitely not decrease, on the contrary, they are to increase. He listed cards with 12GB of VRAM as the minimum for new games, and 16GB would be ideal. After all, the current consoles also have 16 GB of memory (albeit common, it works as both RAM and VRAM), and we are talking about a device on which the game can be directly optimized, which is not possible on PC due to the huge number of potential combinations of components.
– VRAM usage is going to increase dramatically.
– Keeping within an 8GB buffer is now very hard.
– More VRAM allows for significantly better looking games that don’t have to rely on tiled textures.
– Developers have to waste so much time on PC optimizing for lower-end hardware.— Hardware Unboxed (@HardwareUnboxed) April 4, 2023
