How much RAM does a gaming system need and how VRAM can affect it

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Interesting video from Hardware Unboxed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t4uLh2ZK04


https://www.techspot.com/article/153...ed-for-gaming/

They test multiple cards - the GTX1080TI,GTX1060 6GB and GTX1060 3GB.

The 3GB version of the GTX1060 seems to consistently use more system RAM than the 6GB version.

It seems if you have less system RAM,the GTX1060 6GB works better than the 3GB version!!

We found it somewhat ironic that owners of the 3GB GTX 1060, a graphics card we've recommended for budget shoppers, will require 16GB of system memory to get the most out of today's games. So by saving around $50 on the GPU, you need to spend $90 more on system memory. That changes my perspective on things a little.

[Pob255]

interesting read, it's a shame they didn't dig down into the graphics options to see what's actually using all that vram&ram however seeing that overwatch is mentioned as "isn't known for it's super high-quality textures, even when using the epic quality settings." while it used less than 8gb ram and had the least variation with vram sizes, it does look like texture size is the biggest culprit.

And I do wander how much of that is down to sloppy game texture work, applying large textures to onscreen assets that are too small to warrant that texture, in the same way that when dx11 tessellation still gets used to greatly increase poly count on pointless objects (remember all the crysis2 stuff?)