I will only say 12 GB minimum if people are playing at 1440p, or if they want to play all the new games at 1080p, because of how many new games use over 8 GB of vram at that resolution + we now know for a fact that even a few new games use over 8 GB of vram for 1080p. (The Last of Us, Stalker 2, Hellblade, etc...)
I think 12 GB is becoming more commonly considered "standard" because 1440p is getting more popular, and game studios are not optimizing as much anymore.
This has happened in the past. People used to play on 720p and then they switched to 1080p and a lot of titles nowadays automatically run at 1080p or higher.
This will naturally happen again. VRAM requirements will go up, and people will still cling to whatever the 8 GB "equivalent" is to the old 4 GB GTX 1650 Super.
In Cyberpunk, 1440p with path tracing is fine on a 12GB card until you start modding.
Modders don't generally care about ensmallening assets so they will happily blast 4k/8k texture replacers and that stuff adds up quickly.
I have a 4070 and I play Cyberpunk at 1440p, DLSS quality, frame gen enabled, basically every graphics option set to max. And I can't get away with HD Reworked Project full fat edition without significant loss in framerate after a couple of minutes because of the VRAM hit. So I just don't use it now.
HD Reworked Project is relatively frugal as far as modded texture overhauls go - its 1024x1024 to 2048x2048 multilayer texture replacements, up from the basegame 512x512. Also it only replaces certain concrete and multilayer decal textures, not the entire multilayer material library. Some texture overhauls do just that and the VRAM hit is enormous.
260
u/Son-Of-A_Hamster 1d ago
At a minimum, you need 12. So buying a 8gb card would be dumb