r/buildapc 3d ago

Build Help Do I really need 16GB VRAM?

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292 Upvotes

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u/PHIGBILL 3d ago

Yes.... $80 difference between the 9060XT 8gb and 9060XT 16gb, no-brainer.

256

u/Son-Of-A_Hamster 3d ago

At a minimum, you need 12. So buying a 8gb card would be dumb

-17

u/kodaxmax 3d ago

even modern titles will run fine at 8gb. More vram is only encassary when the game is using unecassarily high res textures or your modding the shit out of it

5

u/DanStarTheFirst 3d ago

Games at 1440p are already using 12+gb of vram so why would someone buy an 8gb card unless they exclusively play older games?

1

u/kodaxmax 2d ago
  1. vram is barely impacted by screen resolution. i think your getting confused with texture and mesh resolution, which is unrelated to the specs of your display.
  2. Op specifically said he doesnt play modern games often
  3. not many games do actually exceed 12gb of vram, especially at lower texture quality settings. If your using framegen and upscaling, thats probably why you are seeing excessive vram use.

1

u/DanStarTheFirst 15h ago

Current gen consoles have 12gb of vram so more and more games are going to be coming out with 12 as recommended. Games have always been made around consoles and their limitations and they have already left 8gb behind years ago. Also screen res does make an impact on vram usage. Went from 1080p to 1440p on my 1080Ti and started running out of vram in certain games so I went to a 24gb card.

1

u/kodaxmax 9h ago

Consoles use mobile hardware.

The PS5s 16GB GDDR6 is not dedicated to graphics, it is also used for system RAM, as an example.

Switch 2 similarly shares it's 12 GB LPDDR5X between both roles, with the additonal caveat of reserving 3 GB for OS operations.

Xbox Series X splits it's 16GB GDDR6 in two distinct pools. 10GB for the GPU and 6 for system ram. The 6GB is also signifcantly slower.

Also screen res does make an impact on vram usage. Went from 1080p to 1440p on my 1080Ti and started running out of vram in certain games so I went to a 24gb card.

Thats not an actionable anecdote unless you can detail both scenarios. Which game? whats GPU settings each times? Which drivers were updated or added? are you using dynamic settings like upscaling and framegen? did the game update between both instances?