QOTW: How much RAM must your next graphics card have?

[HEXUS]

Thinking ahead to your next GPU upgrade, what will be your minimum requirement?

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[ricksavoie]

I would say AMD's next top gen card will be 8GB of the HBM to sell it as a 4K card. Nvidia will prob stick with 8GB too. All new mid range cards next year should come with 4GB. I'm not saying that will be true, just the way I think it should be.

[Brian224]

In order to allow for Crossfire or SLI on multi-monitors I would prefer 4GB, but the next card I buy will probably be to crossfire with my current R9 280 and therefore only 3GB (I gave up my 4GB GTX760 so my son could go SLI).

[TRUTHnTRINITY]

4GB is my minimal, not 3.3-3.5 that I received with the GTX 970, but with HBM on the horizon that could changed depending on developers utilization of HBM. I will upgrade to the 390/390x more than likely and I'll feel conformable with it for 3 years.

[Jace007]

Nvidia Pascal should have a mim of 6GB! Thou Nvidia have said pascal could have upto 32GB of 3D stacked RAM http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/03/17/pascal/ - that would be more for professional Card rather than consumer card I would have to say Mim 6GB - Max 12GB.

Not sure what NVLINK is and wither this will require new motherboards to feature this.

[LSG501]

6/8/12GB depending on cost/performance balance (ideally a titan x or 980ti if/when released). But then I don't use it purely for gaming, I use it for 3D rendering so the extra ram is used for gpu rendering etc

[xslavic]

10gb for 390x

[Jace007]

Xslavic I heard 3DFX are making a Voodoo Card with 128GB of RAM ! beat that !

[crossy]

Can I be a pain and say that RAM size doesn't really figure in my graphics card buying decisions? I'm more concerned with overall price/performance and, to a much lesser level, stuff like bundles, reliability, noise, etc.

[KeyboardDemon]

Can I be a pain and say that RAM size doesn't really figure in my graphics card buying decisions? I'm more concerned with overall price/performance and, to a much lesser level, stuff like bundles, reliability, noise, etc.

Yes you can but only if you let me be a bigger pain when I agree with you.

The last time I considered the RAM on my GPU as an important factor during the buying process I was looking at getting an nVidia 8800 GT with a massive 512mb of RAM.

[aidanjt]

8GB is kinda becoming necessary for next gen cards/displays/games, IMO.

[Otherhand]

I guess 4GB, because that's what I've got in my GTX770 right now.

I'm always a bit unsure of how useful the 4GB really is on my current card. Performance is always exactly the same in 2GB vs 4GB benchmarks for my model and when I do try to enable Ultra textures in a lot of newer games, the card does not like it! I expect new cards do a lot better with this spec though. Perhaps my GPU is just not quite good enough to handle the extra data well.

[Stuen4y]

6GB+ for high end and 4GB for mid level graphics cards.

[NightshadowUK]

After spending the last few weeks researching an upgrade for my trusty HD 6950, I've settled on a 4GB minimum.

[Death2g]

Im Thinking 4gb is a min nowadays, however with the release of dx12 i can see that this will increase, as if you are able to use shared memory with SLI/XFIRE it won't mean spending a fortune to get more than 4gb

[KeyboardDemon]

8GB is kinda becoming necessary for next gen cards/displays/games, IMO.

If 8GB becomes necessary for a high end card then all high cards would have 8GB so I would be looking at which high end card I want to pick, I won't be thinking about picking one with 8GB over another that has a different amount. My decision would be based on what the reviews are telling me about how that card is likely to perform in my rig at the resolution that I want to run it at when I buy my next GPU.