# NVIDIA Readies RTX 3060 8GB and RTX 3080 20GB Models



## btarunr (Sep 19, 2020)

A GIGABYTE webpage meant for redeeming the RTX 30-series Watch Dogs Legion + GeForce NOW bundle, lists out eligible graphics cards for the offer, including a large selection of those based on unannounced RTX 30-series GPUs. Among these are references to a "GeForce RTX 3060" with 8 GB of memory, and more interestingly, a 20 GB variant of the RTX 3080. The list also confirms the RTX 3070S with 16 GB of memory.

The RTX 3080 launched last week comes with 10 GB of memory across a 320-bit memory interface, using 8 Gbit memory chips, while the RTX 3090 achieves its 24 GB memory amount by piggy-backing two of these chips per 32-bit channel (chips on either side of the PCB). It's conceivable that the the RTX 3080 20 GB will adopt the same method. There exists a vast price-gap between the RTX 3080 10 GB and the RTX 3090, which NVIDIA could look to fill with the 20 GB variant of the RTX 3080. The question on whether you should wait for the 20 GB variant of the RTX 3080 or pick up th 10 GB variant right now, will depend on the performance gap between the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. We'll answer this question next week.



 



*View at TechPowerUp Main Site*


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## Raendor (Sep 19, 2020)

There also 3070S with 16 gigs on that same list.


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## SIGSEGV (Sep 19, 2020)

I am gonna patiently wait for the 1Tb version.


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## my_name_is_earl (Sep 19, 2020)

And it's gone in 3.... 2.....1


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## btarunr (Sep 19, 2020)

SIGSEGV said:


> I am gonna patiently wait for the 1Tb version.


The logical next step to DirectStorage and RTX-IO is graphics cards with resident non-volatile storage (i.e. SSDs on the card). I think there have already been some professional cards with onboard storage (though not leveraging tech like DirectStorage). You install optimized games directly onto this resident storage, and the GPU has its own downstream PCIe root complex that deals with it.

So I expect RTX 40-series "Hopper" to have 2 TB ~ 8 TB variants.


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## BArms (Sep 19, 2020)

Maybe they should launch the original 3080 first? I really don't consider meeting less than 1% of the demand a real launch.


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## hat (Sep 19, 2020)

Am I the only one that thinks it's a little bit of a reach to posit that normal (even NVMe) storage and the CPUs handling it are too slow, and that the idea of GPU-assisted storage is a little bit ludicrous?


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## BArms (Sep 19, 2020)

hat said:


> Am I the only one that thinks it's a little bit of a reach to posit that normal (even NVMe) storage and the CPUs handling it are too slow, and that the idea of GPU-assisted storage is a little bit ludicrous?



Not sure but I thought the idea was to load textures/animations/model vertex data etc into VRAM where it needs to go anyway.


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## R0H1T (Sep 19, 2020)

hat said:


> the idea of GPU-assisted storage is a little bit ludicrous?


Well technically it's the storage assisting GPU (DirectStorage) unless you meant something like this?

*AMD announces Radeon Pro SSG: A GPU with 1TB of SSD*

While it may not seem much this will reduce a lot of CPU overhead & free it for more FPS.


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## AusWolf (Sep 19, 2020)

If nVidia taught us something with the 20 (Super) series, it's the fact that early buyers get inferior products. That's why I'm going to wait for the 3070 Super/Ti with 16 GB VRAM and a (hopefully) fully unlocked die, unless AMD's RDNA 2 proves to be a huge hit.


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## nikoya (Sep 19, 2020)

they should release the 3080 20gb ASAP
or at least give us a date a price now.

that we can make a decision.


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## AusWolf (Sep 19, 2020)

nikoya said:


> they should release the 3080 20gb ASAP
> or at least give us a date a price now.
> 
> that we can make a decision.


I doubt that they will. With all the hype around the 10 GB version, they can easily milk the cow twice by making informed buyers wait a bit longer.


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## R0H1T (Sep 19, 2020)

nikoya said:


> they should release the 3080 20gb ASAP
> or at least give us a date a price now.
> 
> that we can make a decision.


NVidia's not in the business of making it easy for you, as a consumer you have to decide what's in your best interests.


AusWolf said:


> I doubt that they will. With all the hype around the 10 GB version, they can easily milk the cow twice by making informed buyers wait a bit longer.


Yup, they're making a pretty penny right now so why would they stop?


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## InVasMani (Sep 19, 2020)

It's not listed, but could see a RTX 3060S 16GB being possible as well eventually. That probably depends a lot on the memory controller bandwidth however, but knowing Nvidia if they can get some better binned GDDR chips down the road they'd slap on the extra ram density and faster chips and start selling them to fill whatever gaps can.


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## Hossein Almet (Sep 19, 2020)

I say the 3080 20G will cost somewhere between $1000 and $1200, so buying the 3080 10G now is not a bad thing to do.


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## ZoneDymo (Sep 19, 2020)

yay more SKU's just what I always wanted, THANKS NVIDIA!



AusWolf said:


> If nVidia taught us something with the 20 (Super) series, it's the fact that early buyers get inferior products. That's why I'm going to wait for the 3070 Super/Ti with 16 GB VRAM and a (hopefully) fully unlocked die, unless AMD's RDNA 2 proves to be a huge hit.



Nooo be like the sheep, BUY INTO THE HYPE NOW, heck just get 1 now and another later, you will save money that way!


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## Valantar (Sep 19, 2020)

InVasMani said:


> It's not listed, but could see a RTX 3060S 16GB being possible as well eventually. That probably depends a lot on the memory controller bandwidth however, but knowing Nvidia if they can get some better binned GDDR chips down the road they'd slap on the extra ram density and faster chips and start selling them to fill whatever gaps can.


Why on earth would a 60-tier GPU in 2020 need 16GB of VRAM? Even 8GB is _plenty_ for the types of games and settings that GPU will be capable of handling for its useful lifetime. Shader and RT performance will become a bottleneck at that tier long before 8GB of VRAM does. This is no 1060 3GB.


AusWolf said:


> I doubt that they will. With all the hype around the 10 GB version, they can easily milk the cow twice by making informed buyers wait a bit longer.


RAM chip availability is likely the most important part here. The FE PCB only has that many pads for VRAM, so they'd need double density chips, which likely aren't available yet (at least at any type of scale). Given that GDDR6X is a proprietary Micron standard, there's only one supplier, and it would be very weird if Nvidia didn't first use 100% of available capacity to produce the chips that will go with the vast majority of SKUs.


btarunr said:


> The logical next step to DirectStorage and RTX-IO is graphics cards with resident non-volatile storage (i.e. SSDs on the card). I think there have already been some professional cards with onboard storage (though not leveraging tech like DirectStorage). You install optimized games directly onto this resident storage, and the GPU has its own downstream PCIe root complex that deals with it.
> 
> So I expect RTX 40-series "Hopper" to have 2 TB ~ 8 TB variants.


Does that actually make sense, though? That would mean the GPU sharing the PCIe bus with storage for _all_ CPU/RAM accesses to said storage (and either adding some sort of switch to the card, or adding switching/passthrough capabilities to the GPU die), rather than it being used for only data relevant to the GPU. Isn't a huge part of the point of DirectStorage the ability to transfer compressed data directly to the GPU, reducing bandwidth requirements while also offloading the CPU and also shortening the data path significantly? The savings from having the storage hooked directly to the GPU rather than the PC's PCIe bus seem minuscule in comparison to this - unless you're also positing that this on-board storage will have a much wider interface than PCIe 4.0 x4, which would be a whole other can of worms. I guess it might happen (again) for HPC and the like, for those crunching multi-TB datasets, but other than that this seems nigh on impossible both in terms of cost and board space, and impractical in terms of providing actual performance gains.

Btw, the image also lists two 3080 Super SKUs that the news post doesn't mention.


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## AusWolf (Sep 19, 2020)

ZoneDymo said:


> yay more SKU's just what I always wanted, THANKS NVIDIA!
> 
> 
> 
> Nooo be like the sheep, BUY INTO THE HYPE NOW, heck just get 1 now and another later, you will save money that way!


To be honest, I might have gone with the non-Super skus if I hadn't found 3080 benchmarks so disappointing, compared to initial promises (it's NOT twice as fast as the 2080 Ti, and performance/power data are barely on par despite the new 8 nm process).

Edit: Speaking of which, am I the only one who finds it funny how many more cuda cores the 3080 has compared to any 20 series chip, and still doesn't offer comparably more performance? I mean, the efficiency of single cuda cores must have dropped considerably with Ampere.


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## londiste (Sep 19, 2020)

Valantar said:


> Why on earth would a 60-tier GPU in 2020 need 16GB of VRAM? Even 8GB is _plenty_ for the types of games and settings that GPU will be capable of handling for its useful lifetime. Shader and RT performance will become a bottleneck at that tier long before 8GB of VRAM does. This is no 1060 3GB.


Because it is not the classic 60-tier GPU. From leaks and details we have so far, both 3070 and 3060 will be based on GA104. When it comes to performance we will have to wait and see but 3060 should be roughly around PS5/XBSX performance level, so it will be enough for a long while. 16GB is more of a marketing argument (and maybe preemptive strike against possible AMD competition).



Valantar said:


> Does that actually make sense, though? That would mean the GPU sharing the PCIe bus with storage for _all_ CPU/RAM accesses to said storage (and either adding some sort of switch to the card, or adding switching/passthrough capabilities to the GPU die), rather than it being used for only data relevant to the GPU. Isn't a huge part of the point of DirectStorage the ability to transfer compressed data directly to the GPU, reducing bandwidth requirements while also offloading the CPU and also shortening the data path significantly? The savings from having the storage hooked directly to the GPU rather than the PC's PCIe bus seem minuscule in comparison to this - unless you're also positing that this on-board storage will have a much wider interface than PCIe 4.0 x4, which would be a whole other can of worms. I guess it might happen (again) for HPC and the like, for those crunching multi-TB datasets, but other than that this seems nigh on impossible both in terms of cost and board space, and impractical in terms of providing actual performance gains.


PCI-e 4.0 x16 does not really seem to be a bottleneck yet and probably won't be a big one for a long while when we look at how the scaling testing has gone with 3.0 and 2.0. Fitting 4 lanes worth of data shouldn't matter all that much. On the other hand, I think this shader-augmented compression is short-lived - if it proves very useful, compression will move into hardware as it has already supposedly done in consoles.

Moving the storage to be attached to GPU does not really make sense for desktop/gaming use case. More bandwidth through compression and some type of QoS scheme to prioritize data as needed should be enough and this is where it really seems to be moving towards.


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## T3RM1N4L D0GM4 (Sep 19, 2020)

Release date or GTFO!
(a  *real* release date, not a paper launch, please)


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## BluesFanUK (Sep 19, 2020)

Are people that desperate they can't wait another month to see what AMD have to offer? Nvidia have a history of mugging off their customers, day one purchasers are setting themselves up for buyers remorse.

Give it a month or two and who knows, Turing cards may start tumbling or AMD could knock it out the park. Personally i'm just being sensible and buying a PS5 for the same cost as what one of these overpriced GPU's cost.


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## phill (Sep 19, 2020)

Whatever happened to just giving the different levelled tiers of GPUs normal amounts of VRAM... 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32GB etc..  I don't get it why we need 10GB or 20GB....


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## Caring1 (Sep 19, 2020)

T3RM1N4L D0GM4 said:


> Release date or GTFO!
> (a  *real* release date, not a paper launch, please)


So can prep your bots?


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## PooPipeBoy (Sep 19, 2020)

AMD buyer's cycle: "I'm waiting for the next generation" [New product launches] "Seems nice, but I'll wait for the next one which will be even better"

Nvidia buyer's cycle: "I NEED IT RIGHT NOW, GIMME GIMME" [New product launches] "SHIT, I SHOULD'VE WAITED FOR THE BETTER VERSION"


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## Bubster (Sep 19, 2020)

Glad this news update came out to calm the ampere hysteria down...3080 with 20 gig


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## nguyen (Sep 19, 2020)

PooPipeBoy said:


> AMD buyer's cycle: "I'm waiting for the next generation" [New product launches] "Seems nice, but I'll wait for the next one which will be even better"
> 
> Nvidia buyer's cycle: "I NEED IT RIGHT NOW, GIMME GIMME" [New product launches] "SHIT, I SHOULD'VE WAITED FOR THE BETTER VERSION"



Perfect summary, and that's why Nvidia is so filthy rich right now


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## lexluthermiester (Sep 19, 2020)

InVasMani said:


> It's not listed, but could see a RTX 3060S 16GB being possible as well eventually.


That would be interesting.



phill said:


> Whatever happened to just giving the different levelled tiers of GPUs normal amounts of VRAM... 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32GB etc..  I don't get it why we need 10GB or 20GB....


With you on that one. I want a 16GB model of the 3080. I don't mind if it's only 256bit memory bus. A 16GB 3070 would also be good.


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## ppn (Sep 19, 2020)

Bubster said:


> Glad this news update came out to calm the ampere hysteria down...3080 with 20 gig



Not the same shader count though 10240 vs 8704.


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## r9 (Sep 19, 2020)

What are the expectations price performance for RTX3060?

Price ~$350
Perform ~RTX2070


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## Vya Domus (Sep 19, 2020)

A 20GB 3080 would definitely be more enticing but I don't want to find out what the price would be. By the way, 12GB is much more likely than 20. 



phill said:


> Whatever happened to just giving the different levelled tiers of GPUs normal amounts of VRAM... 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32GB etc..  I don't get it why we need 10GB or 20GB....



You can't just put any memory configuration, the VRAM capacity is linked with that the GPU's memory controllers and bus interfaces can do.


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## AusWolf (Sep 19, 2020)

BluesFanUK said:


> Are people that desperate they can't wait another month to see what AMD have to offer? Nvidia have a history of mugging off their customers, day one purchasers are setting themselves up for buyers remorse.
> 
> Give it a month or two and who knows, Turing cards may start tumbling or AMD could knock it out the park. Personally i'm just being sensible and buying a PS5 for the same cost as what one of these overpriced GPU's cost.


That's cool, though buying a console that's only good for playing games, and then buying all my circa 300 games that I own on Steam again, and playing them with a useless controller instead of WASD is totally out of the question for me. Besides, building a new PC is fun, plugging a box into my TV is boring.

As for the desperation part: I agree. Better to wait than to buy the first released, inferior product.


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## ppn (Sep 19, 2020)

r9 said:


> What are the expectations price performance for RTX3060?
> 
> Price ~$350
> Perform ~RTX2070



$350 is where usually 60% perf of the $700 xx80 cards lands. like 1060 and 2060 were.

RTX 3060 8G 4864 ~~ RTX 2080/S ~~ 60% of RTX 3081

RTX 3080 10G 8704 new shader is 31% faster than 4352 turing, and the memory is only 23% faster,
so to get the average of 31% the shader must be pulling ahead with being 39% faster  ~~6144 shaders fp32 and 2560 int32.


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## Space Lynx (Sep 19, 2020)

BArms said:


> Maybe they should launch the original 3080 first? I really don't consider meeting less than 1% of the demand a real launch.



Look at my signature. Soon you will join me in the true gaming realm my padawan.


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## Valantar (Sep 19, 2020)

londiste said:


> Because it is not the classic 60-tier GPU. From leaks and details we have so far, both 3070 and 3060 will be based on GA104. When it comes to performance we will have to wait and see but 3060 should be roughly around PS5/XBSX performance level, so it will be enough for a long while. 16GB is more of a marketing argument (and maybe preemptive strike against possible AMD competition).


That makes no sense. What defines a 60-series card? Mainly that it's two tiers down from the 80-series. Which die it's based on, how wide a memory bus it has, etc. is all variable and dependent on factors that come before product segmentation (die yields, production capacity, etc.). Which die the 3060 is based on doesn't matter whatsoever - it's specifications decide performance. Heck, there have been 2060s based on at least three different Turing dice, and they all perform identically in most workloads. The 3060 might obviously be around the XSX performance level (saying "XSX/PS5 performance level" is quite broad given that one is 20% faster than the other), or at least the PS5 performance level, but that still doesn't mean 8GB isn't plenty for it. People really need to stop this idiocy about VRAM usage being the be-all, end-all of performance longevity - that is only true for a select few GPUs throughout history.


londiste said:


> PCI-e 4.0 x16 does not really seem to be a bottleneck yet and probably won't be a big one for a long while when we look at how the scaling testing has gone with 3.0 and 2.0. Fitting 4 lanes worth of data shouldn't matter all that much. On the other hand, I think this shader-augmented compression is short-lived - if it proves very useful, compression will move into hardware as it has already supposedly done in consoles.
> 
> Moving the storage to be attached to GPU does not really make sense for desktop/gaming use case. More bandwidth through compression and some type of QoS scheme to prioritize data as needed should be enough and this is where it really seems to be moving towards.


I agree that it'll likely move into dedicated hardware, but that hardware is likely to live on the GPU, as that is where the data will be needed. Adding this to CPUs makes little sense - people keep CPUs longer than GPUs, GPUs have (much) bigger power budgets, and for the type of compression in question (specifically DirectStorage-supported algorithms) games are likely to be >99% of the use cases.

As for creating a bottleneck, it's still going to be quite a while until GPUs saturate PCIe 4.0 x16 (or even 3.0 x16), but SSDs use _a lot_ of bandwidth and need to communicate with the entire system, not just the GPU. Sure, the GPU will be what needs the biggest chunks of data the quickest, but chaining an SSD off the GPU still makes far less sense than just keeping it directly attached to the PCIe bus like we do today. That way everything gets near optimal access. The only major improvement over this would be the GPU using the SSD as an expanded memory of sorts (like that oddball Radeon Pro did), but that would mean the system isn't able to use it as storage. And I sincerely doubt people would be particularly willing to add the cost of another multi-TB SSD to their PCs without getting any additional storage in return.


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## rtwjunkie (Sep 19, 2020)

BArms said:


> Not sure but I thought the idea was to load textures/animations/model vertex data etc into VRAM where it needs to go anyway.


Quite a few games just have lazy devs that load far more into VRAM than necessary to play the game. We are still not at the stage where we NEED that much VRAM.


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## Nater (Sep 19, 2020)

rtwjunkie said:


> Quite a few games just have lazy devs that load far more into VRAM than necessary to play the game. We are still not at the stage where we NEED that much VRAM.



Every thread is going on about this VRAM "issue".  Look at the system requirements for Cyberpunk 2077...I don't think we're hitting a wall here anytime soon.


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## ppn (Sep 19, 2020)

Valantar said:


> The 3060 might obviously be around the XSX performance level (saying "XSX/PS5 performance level" is quite broad given that one is 20% faster than the other),



3060 6GB 3840 cuda.
3060 8GB 4864 cuda

there you have it, 8GB version is 30% faster,


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## Vayra86 (Sep 19, 2020)

I thought 10GB was enough guys... 

Guess Nvidia doesn't agree and brings us the real deal after the initial wave of stupid bought the subpar cards.

Well played, Huang.


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## Lionheart (Sep 19, 2020)

AusWolf said:


> If nVidia taught us something with the 20 (Super) series, it's the fact that early buyers get inferior products. That's why I'm going to wait for the 3070 Super/Ti with 16 GB VRAM and a (hopefully) fully unlocked die, unless AMD's RDNA 2 proves to be a huge hit.



This times 100. I'm playing the waiting game, tbh we all are cause no one can get a new card anyways.


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## xorbe (Sep 19, 2020)

Need to see 3070S 16GB vs 2080Ti benchmarks.


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## CrAsHnBuRnXp (Sep 19, 2020)

3080 20GB is going to be the Ti variant. Calling it now.


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## InVasMani (Sep 19, 2020)

Valantar said:


> Why on earth would a 60-tier GPU in 2020 need 16GB of VRAM? Even 8GB is _plenty_ for the types of games and settings that GPU will be capable of handling for its useful lifetime. Shader and RT performance will become a bottleneck at that tier long before 8GB of VRAM does. This is no 1060 3GB.
> 
> RAM chip availability is likely the most important part here. The FE PCB only has that many pads for VRAM, so they'd need double density chips, which likely aren't available yet (at least at any type of scale). Given that GDDR6X is a proprietary Micron standard, there's only one supplier, and it would be very weird if Nvidia didn't first use 100% of available capacity to produce the chips that will go with the vast majority of SKUs.
> 
> ...


 I didn't say 16GB would be practical, but I could still see it happening. To be fair if they could piggy back 12GB to a RTX3060 down the road that would make much more sense in relation to the weaker harder and you might say similar to the RTX3080 situation going from 10GB to 20GB if they could simply piggy back on a few of the chips rather than every GDDR chip and scale the density further that way that's probably a more ideal scenario for everyone involved except Micron.



londiste said:


> Because it is not the classic 60-tier GPU. From leaks and details we have so far, both 3070 and 3060 will be based on GA104. When it comes to performance we will have to wait and see but 3060 should be roughly around PS5/XBSX performance level, so it will be enough for a long while. 16GB is more of a marketing argument (and maybe preemptive strike against possible AMD competition).


 Agreed it's more marketing than practicality, but that said it's a new generation GPU with new capabilities so while it might be more anemic and stretched thin in resources for that amount of VRAM perhaps newer hardware is at least more capable of utilizing it by intelligently managing it with other techniques DLSS, VRS, mesh shading, ect, but we'll see the RTX3060 isn't even out yet so we don't know nearly enough to conclude what it'll be like entirely. GPU's are becoming more flexible at managing resources every generation though on the plus side.


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## P4-630 (Sep 19, 2020)

> by piggy-backing two of these chips per 32-bit channel (chips on either side of the PCB).



How hot would these chips get with some thermal pads and just a backplate on top of it.


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## rbgc (Sep 19, 2020)

Answer from u/NV_Tim, Community Manager from NVIDIA GeForce Global Community Team

*Why only 10 GB of memory for RTX 3080? How was that determined to be a sufficient number, when it is stagnant from the previous generation?*
-
Justin Walker, Director of GeForce product management

We’re constantly analyzing memory requirements of the latest games and regularly review with game developers to understand their memory needs for current and upcoming games. The goal of 3080 is to give you great performance at up to 4k resolution with all the settings maxed out at the best possible price.

In order to do this, you need a very powerful GPU with high speed memory and enough memory to meet the needs of the games. A few examples. If you look at Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Metro Exodus, Wolfenstein Youngblood, Gears of War 5, Borderlands 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2 running on a 3080 at 4k with Max settings (including any applicable high res texture packs) and RTX On, when the game supports it, you get in the range of 60-100fps and use anywhere from 4GB to 6GB of memory.

Extra memory is always nice to have but it would increase the price of the graphics card, so we need to find the right balance.
-


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## ppn (Sep 19, 2020)

if MVDCC power shows 70 watt on 3080, this is 7 watts per chip, hard to cool, 3090 i think those are higher density not piggy.

According to spec 3070S should land around 70% of 3080, 2080Ti being 76%. pretty close.


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## T3RM1N4L D0GM4 (Sep 19, 2020)

Caring1 said:


> So can prep your bots?


So I can press F5 and see _Product unavailable_


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## TechLurker (Sep 19, 2020)

I feel the Radeon SSG prototype helped inform the direct access capability that both upcoming consoles use in slightly different ways, as well as a future possible interim-upgrade path on theoretical mid-high end GPU models in both the gaming and professional areas. Professionally, the SSG showed it can both be used as extra storage on top of being used as an ultra-fast scratch drive, according to Anandtech's article, with only the main hurdle being getting software devs to incorporate the necessary API stuff. It could be a neat feature to install your high-end games onto the GPU drive or save your project to said drive, and let the GPU load it direct from there and effectively "stream" the project/game assets in realtime.

I could see a future Radeon X700+ series and NVIDIA X070+ series of GPUs and their professional equivalents incorporating an option to install an nVME PCIe 4.0 (or 5.0, since that's tech supposedly due late next year or 2022 and expected to last for quite awhile) onto the card, as a way to boost available memory for either professional or gaming purposes. Or maybe Intel could beat the competition to market, using Optane add-ons to their own respective GPUs, acting more like reserve VRAM expansion thanks to higher Read/Write performance than typical NVMe, but less than GDDR/HBM.


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## Dudebro-420 (Sep 19, 2020)

Raendor said:


> There also 3070S with 16 gigs on that same list.



Yeah that's what the article said.


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## Jism (Sep 19, 2020)

btarunr said:


> The logical next step to DirectStorage and RTX-IO is graphics cards with resident non-volatile storage (i.e. SSDs on the card). I think there have already been some professional cards with onboard storage (though not leveraging tech like DirectStorage). You install optimized games directly onto this resident storage, and the GPU has its own downstream PCIe root complex that deals with it.
> 
> So I expect RTX 40-series "Hopper" to have 2 TB ~ 8 TB variants.



Dont work like that. It's only menth / designed as a *cache* without streaming the data from SSD/HDD/memory over the PCI-E bus.

but i'm sure you could utilitize all that memory one day, as some storage.


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## InVasMani (Sep 20, 2020)

P4-630 said:


> How hot would these chips get with some thermal pads and just a backplate on top of it.


 Who knows I'm sure if they get real hot the backplate would be a obvious indicator. Ram isn't generally particularly hot though in the first place. It's not like that can't be resolved trivially connecting it with some heat pipe cooling to the bottom heat sink cooling.


TechLurker said:


> I feel the Radeon SSG prototype helped inform the direct access capability that both upcoming consoles use in slightly different ways, as well as a future possible interim-upgrade path on theoretical mid-high end GPU models in both the gaming and professional areas. Professionally, the SSG showed it can both be used as extra storage on top of being used as an ultra-fast scratch drive, according to Anandtech's article, with only the main hurdle being getting software devs to incorporate the necessary API stuff. It could be a neat feature to install your high-end games onto the GPU drive or save your project to said drive, and let the GPU load it direct from there and effectively "stream" the project/game assets in realtime.
> 
> I could see a future Radeon X700+ series and NVIDIA X070+ series of GPUs and their professional equivalents incorporating an option to install an nVME PCIe 4.0 (or 5.0, since that's tech supposedly due late next year or 2022 and expected to last for quite awhile) onto the card, as a way to boost available memory for either professional or gaming purposes. Or maybe Intel could beat the competition to market, using Optane add-ons to their own respective GPUs, acting more like reserve VRAM expansion thanks to higher Read/Write performance than typical NVMe, but less than GDDR/HBM.


 I already thought about the Optane thing. AMD could just counter that with a DDR DIMM or LPDDR DIMM combined with a microSD card and doing ram disk backups to the non-volatile storage leveraging a integrated CPU chip which could also do compression/decompression as well which further improves performance. Optane is a fair amount slower by comparison to even the DDR option. Optane is cheaper per gigabyte than DDR, but it doesn't require much DDR to speed up a whole lot of memory is the reality of it you're mostly confined by the interface hence why the Gigabyte I-RAM was kind of a dud on performance relative to what you would have hoped for utilizing the memory and that's also sort of a bit limitation to HDD's on board cache performance as well it too is limited by that same interface protocol it's attached to NVMe is infinately better than SATA III in that regard especially on PCIE 4.0 unfortunately HDD's have pretty near ceased to innovate since SSD's took over on the performance side.


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## Paganstomp (Sep 20, 2020)

It's another "We are sorry paper launch!" LOL!


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## sliderider (Sep 20, 2020)

InVasMani said:


> It's not listed, but could see a RTX 3060S 16GB being possible as well eventually. That probably depends a lot on the memory controller bandwidth however, but knowing Nvidia if they can get some better binned GDDR chips down the road they'd slap on the extra ram density and faster chips and start selling them to fill whatever gaps can.



I don't see that happening at all. It would be too expensive for the performance class it's in.


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## Seanlighting (Sep 20, 2020)

I've seen this RAM argument since Unreal Tournament came out. Always get the higher RAM version of the card. GTX 960 reviews all said 4 GB cards were pointless because of the bus and die limitations coupled with most games only needing 2 GB for 1080p gaming. 3 years later the 2 GB card was useless for 1080p anything. Same reason I picked up the 128 meg version of the 8500. "64 megs is more than enough to run any game and it's what the GeForce is using at the same price point."


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## rtwjunkie (Sep 20, 2020)

Seanlighting said:


> 3 years later the 2 GB card was useless for 1080p anything.



3 years later the 960 4GB GM206 chip was useless as well. The 4 GB of VRAM barely helped. I had one just to mess around with on an extra system. It was a nice bang for the buck in it’s first year sure. But 3 years later? Time passed it by.


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## lexluthermiester (Sep 20, 2020)

rtwjunkie said:


> 3 years later the 960 4GB GM206 chip was useless as well.


I wouldn't call it useless, but it's certainly not going to be anyone's first choice either. I can think of a few games where the extra 2GB helped. Of course that is going to be true for any 2GB card that had a 4GB variant.


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## R0H1T (Sep 20, 2020)

Seanlighting said:


> I've seen this RAM argument since Unreal Tournament came out. Always get the higher RAM version of the card. GTX 960 reviews all said 4 GB cards were pointless because of the bus and die limitations coupled with most games only needing 2 GB for 1080p gaming. 3 years later the 2 GB card was useless for 1080p anything. Same reason I picked up the 128 meg version of the 8500. "64 megs is more than enough to run any game and it's what the GeForce is using at the same price point."


The flip side to that argument today is that with PCIe 4.0 & top speed NVMe SSDs you probably don't need too much VRAM, with *DirectStorage* making it's debut, for next gen AAA titles. Which is probably one of the reasons why we see so many VRAM configurations up here, the caveat to that is we need a *PCIe 4.0* capable chip i.e. AMD *zen2 & above*


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## Mussels (Sep 20, 2020)

BArms said:


> Not sure but I thought the idea was to load textures/animations/model vertex data etc into VRAM where it needs to go anyway.



Ever copied a bunch of small files from one SSD to another? Ever watched an older game take forever to load, despite the fact your SSD can move the entire game directory in seconds?

This is just a software overhaul (directX) with hardware acceleration being added in


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## Jism (Sep 20, 2020)

Seanlighting said:


> I've seen this RAM argument since Unreal Tournament came out. Always get the higher RAM version of the card. GTX 960 reviews all said 4 GB cards were pointless because of the bus and die limitations coupled with most games only needing 2 GB for 1080p gaming. 3 years later the 2 GB card was useless for 1080p anything. Same reason I picked up the 128 meg version of the 8500. "64 megs is more than enough to run any game and it's what the GeForce is using at the same price point."



I disagree. There's visible zero advantage of running a 32MB vs 64MB card or to stay in the realm of 2020, the Rx480 4GB vs RX480 8GB. It wont offer any difference at all really as the games themself dont pull a magic trick to suddenly boost fps with with 50% or so.

Memory consumption of GPU's is primarily due to textures, and textures get 'streamed' from GPU memory sort of say without the game pulling them from the HDD/SSD/RAM which is obviously slower. Side effects like AA to store temporarily frames inside of it etc. Please note that the 4GB vs 8GB version in the RX480/580 is not a good test as the 4GB has slower ram (1750Mhz vs 2000Mhz). But to put it equal the cards would perform the same on the same clocks.

I had a Geforce 2MX 64MB back in the days; compared that to a Geforce 2MX 32MB, zero difference, since the GPU was'nt powerfull enough to run on higher resolutions where the extra ram would be usefull. Even a 4GB fury of AMD still can cope up just fine on everything you throw at it. It's just at some point, that the GPU itself wont be powerfull enough to continue rendering the frames in a desired framerate-span.









						AMD Declares That The Era of 4GB Graphics Cards is Over
					

AMD has declared that the era of 4 GB graphics cards is over and that users should "Game Beyond 4 GB". AMD has conducted testing of its 4 GB RX 5500XT & 8 GB RX 5500XT to see how much of a difference VRAM can make on gaming performance. AMD tested the cards on a variety of games at 1080p...




					www.techpowerup.com
				




They are running tests here on Ultra and it's obvious that big textures require alot of ram. If a GPU cant store any more it's being stored in the RAM of your system, which obviously takes a latency in account when fething that data. My RX580 has 8GB of ram but it's not too powerfull still to run fully maxed out at 2560x1080 ... Even if the game just utilitizes 6GB of 8GB in total. The GPU behind it has to take advantage, otherwise it's another "Oh this one has more GHz/MB/MBPS" decision.









						VGA Legacy MKIII - SiS 315
					

Mainstrean model with added DX7 support and 128bit memory bus.   Pepino's cards: Jaton 128MB card has not original cooler.




					www.vgamuseum.info
				




This one was the first if i'm correct that loaded up to 128MB on a single VGA card, but was in a way completely useless. The card was'nt even faster then a regular Geforce 2MX. Nvidia released the Gf2mx as well with both 32MB and 64MB, as it pretty much did nothing in regards of gaming.


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## nguyen (Sep 20, 2020)

Oh boy this VRAM discussions never end.
The GTX 980 with 4GB VRAM is still a capable GPU even today, pretty much match RX 580 8GB in any DX11 games (Maxwell kinda suck at DX12 and Vulkan)

Here is how GTX 980 perform in FS 2020, a game that will fill any VRAM available





Nvidia has had memory compression for ages, Ampere is already the 6th iteration of it (Turing being the 5th).
Here is 2080 Ti using less VRAM than 5700XT and Radeon VII in FS 2020, even though the 2080 Ti is much more powerful than both





At 4K FS2020 will try to eat as much VRAM as possible (>11GB) but that doesn't translate to real performance.


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## HisDivineOrder (Sep 20, 2020)

R0H1T said:


> The flip side to that argument today is that with PCIe 4.0 & top speed NVMe SSDs you probably don't need too much VRAM, with *DirectStorage* making it's debut, for next gen AAA titles. Which is probably one of the reasons why we see so many VRAM configurations up here, the caveat to that is we need a *PCIe 4.0* capable chip i.e. AMD *zen2 & above*



I guarantee more games will use that extra VRAM much more quickly than start using DirectStorage, especially nvidia's custom add-on to it that requires explicit programming to use fully. Games today use 6-8GB of RAM regularly and they're mostly ports from consoles with 8GB of total system RAM. That 6-8 is what happens when you have the 6 for the GPU and 2 for the system of the consoles plus some change for 4k resolution textures.

This generation, it's going to be consoles with 16GB with probably 4-6GB on the system and 10-12GB-ish for the GPU. When your GPU in your cutting edge PC has less VRAM than or the same (10GB GPU-optimized memory in Xbox Series X) as your console is dedicating to its GPU, then there's a problem because you're going to want expanded headroom to make up for the fact that DirectStorage will not get as much use on PC as it will on Xbox where it's an absolute given. On PC, it's an optional feature for only the latest version of cards and only for users with the absolute fastest NVME drives (of which most people won't have), which means it won't be used for years to come. Look how long RTX adoption took and is taking.

So yeah. Having more VRAM makes your $700 investment last longer. Like 1080 Ti-levels of lasting. Nvidia thinks they can convince enough people to buy more cards with less memory, which is why these early launch cards are going without the extra memory. It'll look fine right now, but by the end of next year, people will start feeling the pinch, but it won't be until 2022 that they'd really notice. If you buy your card and are fine replacing it by the time games are being fully designed for Xbox Series X and PS5 instead of Xbox One X and PS4, then buy the lower memory cards and rock on.

I don't buy a GPU but once in a while, so I'll be waiting for the real cards to come. Don't want to get stuck having to buy a new card sooner than I like because I was impatient.


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## Mussels (Sep 20, 2020)

Edit: I'm no w1zzard, but i do have a crapton of GPU's in the house i play around with to stave off boredom. 750Ti 2GB, RX 470 4GB (modded to 580 4GB via BIOS flash), RX 580 8GB, , 780 3GB (RIP, i set it on fire), 970 4GB, 980 4GB, 1070 ti, 1080 8GB on 280mm AIO, and soon a 3080 10GB. Any time i build a new rig, i start with one of the easier to deal with GPU's, do a few benchmarks as stress tests THEN throw the intended GPU in. Saves accidentally killing an important piece of hardware.

In all honesty, i've got a 980 4GB that can still game (at lower settings) on my second 1440p screen (its only 60hz, so its usable) and it also handles VR just fine.
The RX580 8GB? Sure the VRAM doesnt run out, but the GPU cant handle the performance needed for anything that benefits from the 8GB.

There are times when low VRAM cards come out and its just stupid to buy them (1060 3GB, which was a crap amount of ram AND a weaker GPU than the 6GB version) and i wouldnt buy less than 8GB *now* in 2020, but just like CPU cores the genuine requirements are very very slow to creep up - my view is that by the time 10GB is no longer enough (3-4 years?), i'll just upgrade my GPU anyway.

In the case of the RTX 30 series and all this fancy new shit like hardware accelerated streaming from NVME, i think VRAM requirements aren't going to be as harsh for a few years... in supported games you get a speed boost to prevent texture streaming stuttering, and at lower settings they'll be coded for the average user anyway still running a 1050ti 4GB on a basic SATA SSD.

Quite often the higher VRAM versions have drawbacks, either slower VRAM or higher heat/wattage hurting overall performance... for a long, long time the higher VRAM versions were always crippled.
I see no issue with turning textures from ultra to high, and upgrading twice as often (since i can afford to... i dont expect the 3080 20GB to be cost efficient)


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## Jism (Sep 20, 2020)

The 1060 3GB was specially made for internet cafe's that could get away with 1080p gaming and 60 fps or so. Like the chip was capable of doing that but it woud'nt make sense to place more ram on that card since the GPU cant cope with anything higher then 1080p.

Pretty much any GPU you buy today, wether thats a 4, 8, 10, 12, 16, or even 20GB model; it still works for the way it was intended. Like a 1080p card. or a 4K gaming card. Graphic vendors are'nt stupid. And games that put a load through the ram is mostly due to *caching* which overall brings like 1 to 3% performance increase rather then streaming this from ram or even disc.

The PS5's SSD is such fast that it could load in less then a second a complete terrain. No need for a GPU with huge chunks of memory anymore. They just portion what they need and stream the rest off SSD. And Nvidia is cheating. Their texture compression is such aggresive that there is a quality difference in both brands, AMD and Nvidia. In my opinion AMD just looks overall better and that might explain why AMD cards tend to be a tad slower then Nvidia's.


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## Mussels (Sep 20, 2020)

The PS5 uses these exact same technologies for its fast loading, hardware acccelerated decompression from NVME (custom or not, its still NVME)

PS5, new Xbox and directX all are just using their own branded version of the same concept: accelerate the shit out of decompressing the files, so we can bypass the previous limits given to us by mechanical hard drives


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## rtwjunkie (Sep 20, 2020)

HisDivineOrder said:


> I guarantee more games will use that extra VRAM much more quickly than start using DirectStorage,


“Will use” is not the same thing as NEEDING it. Just because game devs scheduled VRAM to be filled because it is available is not the same thing as that amount of VRAM being necessary to run the game. 

Lazy devs have people so confused and bamboozled, and NVIDIA is more than willing to create cards for this currently perceived need for large amounts of VRAM. They will make lots more profit over this perceived need as well.

By the time these higher than 10-12GB of VRAM are needed, the GPU’s themselves will be obsolete.


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## Mussels (Sep 20, 2020)

I mean, if 10GB wasn't enough for 4K gaming, w1zz would have discovered that in his review.

For 8K i can imagine we need more, but these are not 8K cards - the 3090 can scrape by for that with DLSS, but thats really running at a lower res anyway... oh that means my 10GB will be fine for even longer, wooo.


The 3070 16GB will be a joke of a card, the VRAM will totally be pointless unless they use it to speed up loading times in fortnite or some other niche gimmick.


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## jesdals (Sep 20, 2020)

I like that Nvidia give this info now because its going to mesh with the Scalpers - how hard is it going to be to make that 50+ profit now


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## Vayra86 (Sep 20, 2020)

rbgc said:


> Extra memory is always nice to have but it would increase the price of the graphics card, so we need to find the *right margins for our shareholders and planned obscolescence is just bonus!*
> -



FTFY
Old games dont set the norm and this still doesnt explain why two previous gens had more. Didnt that same game exist during the release of a 2080ti? Precisely.

If you expect less than 4-5 years of solid gaming off this hardware you're probably doing it wrong, too.


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## nguyen (Sep 20, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> FTFY
> Old games dont set the norm and this still doesnt explain why two previous gens had more. Didnt that same game exist during the release of a 2080ti? Precisely.
> 
> If you expect less than 4-5 years of solid gaming off this hardware you're probably doing it wrong, too.



980 Ti was released 5.5 years ago with 6GB VRAM and still very capable of 1440p gaming today.
Sounds like lowering the texture details from Ultra to High is too hard for some people , also those exact same people who would complain about performance per dollars too, imagine having useless amount of VRAM would do to the perf/usd...


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## Valantar (Sep 20, 2020)

HisDivineOrder said:


> I guarantee more games will use that extra VRAM much more quickly than start using DirectStorage, especially nvidia's custom add-on to it that requires explicit programming to use fully. Games today use 6-8GB of RAM regularly and they're mostly ports from consoles with 8GB of total system RAM. That 6-8 is what happens when you have the 6 for the GPU and 2 for the system of the consoles plus some change for 4k resolution textures.
> 
> This generation, it's going to be consoles with 16GB with probably 4-6GB on the system and 10-12GB-ish for the GPU. When your GPU in your cutting edge PC has less VRAM than or the same (10GB GPU-optimized memory in Xbox Series X) as your console is dedicating to its GPU, then there's a problem because you're going to want expanded headroom to make up for the fact that DirectStorage will not get as much use on PC as it will on Xbox where it's an absolute given. On PC, it's an optional feature for only the latest version of cards and only for users with the absolute fastest NVME drives (of which most people won't have), which means it won't be used for years to come. Look how long RTX adoption took and is taking.
> 
> ...


The Xbox Series X has 16Gb of RAM, of which 2.5GB is reserved for the OS and the remaining 13.5GB is available for software. 10GB of those 13.5 are of the full bandwidth (560GB/s?) variety, with the remaining 3.5GB being slower due to that console's odd two-tiered RAM configuration. That (likely) means that games will _at the very most_ use 10GB of VRAM, though the split between game RAM usage and VRAM is very likely not going to be 3.5:10. Those would be edge cases at the very best. Sony hasn't disclosed this kind of data, but given that the PS5 has a less powerful GPU, it certainly isn't going to need more VRAM than the XSX.

That might be seen as an indication that a more powerful GPU might need more than 10GB of RAM, but then you need to remember that consoles are developed for 5-7-year life cycles, not 3-year ones like PC dGPUs. 10GB on the 3080 is going to be more than enough, even if you use it for more than three years. Besides, VRAM allocation (which is what _all _software reads as "VRAM use") is not the same as VRAM that's actually _being used to render the game_. Most games have aggressively opportunistic streaming systems that pre-load data into VRAM in case it's needed. The entire point of DirectStorage is to reduce the amount of unnecessarily loaded data - _which then translates to a direct drop in "VRAM use"_. Sure, it also frees up more VRAM to be actually put to use (say, for even higher resolution textures), but the chances of that becoming a requirement for games in the next few years is essentially zero.

Also, that whole statement about "I guarantee more games will use that extra VRAM much more quickly than start using DirectStorage, especially nvidia's custom add-on to it that requires explicit programming to use fully" does not compute. I mean, DirectStorage is an API, so obviously you need to put in the relevant API calls and program for it for it to work. That's how APIs work, and it has zero to do with "Nvidia's custom add-on to it" - RTX-IO is from all we know a straightforward implementation of DS. Anything else would be pretty stupid of them, given that DS is in the XSX and will as such be in most games made for that platform in the near future, including PC ports. For Nvidia to force additional programming on top of this would make no sense, and it would likely place them at a competitive disadvantage given the likelihood that AMD will be adding DS-compatibility to their new GPUs as well...



nguyen said:


> 980 Ti was released 5.5 years ago with 6GB VRAM and still very capable of 1440p gaming today.
> Sounds like lowering the texture details from Ultra to High is too hard for some people , also those exact same people who would complain about performance per dollars too, imagine having useless amount of VRAM would do to the perf/usd...


Some people apparently see it as deeply problematic when a GPU that could otherwise deliver a cinematic ~24fps instead delivers 10 due to a VRAM limitation. Oh, I know, there have been cases where the FPS could have been higher - even in playable territories - if it wasn't for the low amount of VRAM, but that's exceedingly rare. In the vast majority of cases, VRAM limitations kick in at a point when the GPU is already delivering sub-par performance and you need to lower settings anyway. But apparently that's hard for people to accept, as you say. More VRAM has for a decade or so been the no-benefit upsell of the GPU business. It's really about time people started seeing through that crap.


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## Vayra86 (Sep 20, 2020)

nguyen said:


> 980 Ti was released 5.5 years ago with 6GB VRAM and still very capable of 1440p gaming today.
> Sounds like lowering the texture details from Ultra to High is too hard for some people , also those exact same people who would complain about performance per dollars too, imagine having useless amount of VRAM would do to the perf/usd...



Yes, there are many, many examples of well balanced GPUs for their time. There are also examples of those that aren't as well balanced. A slew of 2GB GPUs is among them, on the edge of the 970 releasing with 4GB. And even that was problematic, Nvidia needed a few driver updates to funnel most activity towards the 'faster' 3.5GB as some examples at the time showed with early Maxwell drivers. The 980 had no such issues.

To stick with that time frame, the Fury X (4GB) today is a great example - despite its super fast HBM and bandwidth - that sucks monkey balls in VRAM intensive games today. The card has lost performance over time. Substantially. And it performs relatively worse than 980ti does today and worse than it did at time of launch.

The same thing is what I am seeing here. We're looking at a very good perf jump this gen, while the VRAM is all over the place. Turing already cut some things back, and we remained not only stagnant, but actually _lost VRAM relative to raw performance_ this gen. I'm not sure about your crystal ball, but mine is showing me a similar 2GB > 4GB generational jump where the lower VRAM cards are going to fall off faster. That specific jump also made us realize the 7970 with its 3GB was pretty damn future proof for its days, remember... A 10GB card with performance well above the 2080ti, especially at 4K, should simply be having more than that. I don't care what a PR dude from Nvidia thinks about it. I do care about the actual specs of actual consoles launching and doing pseudo-4K with lots of internal scaling. The PC will be doing more than that, but makes do with slightly less VRAM? I don't follow that logic and I'm not buying it either - especially not at a price tag of 700+.

To each his own. Let's revisit this in 4-5 years time. All of this is even without considering the vast amount of other stuff people can do on a PC with their GPUs to tax VRAM further, within the same performance bracket: most notably modding. Texture mods; adding assets and effects will rapidly eat up those precious GBs. I like my GPUs capable to have that freedom.



Valantar said:


> consoles are developed for 5-7-year life cycles, not 3-year ones like PC dGPUs.



There you have it. Who decided PC dGPU is developed for a 3 year life cycle? It certainly wasn't us. They last double that time without any hiccups whatsoever, and even then hold resale value. Especially the high end. I'll take 4-5 if you don't mind. The 1080 I'm running now, makes 4-5 just fine, and then some. The 780ti I had prior, did similar, and they both had life in them still.

Two GPU upgrades per console gen is utterly ridiculous and unnecessary, since we all know the real jumps happen with real console gen updates.


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## Parn (Sep 20, 2020)

3070S with 16GB and fully enabled GA104 would be more interesting to me as long as its price remains the same as the vanilla 3070.


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## Vya Domus (Sep 20, 2020)

With every generation of consoles memory requirements ballooned, it happened with PS3/360, it also happened with PS4/Xbox One. Why are people convinced that it's not going to happen this time around is beyond me.

Nvidia's marketing is top notch, of course they would never admit that VRAM is going to be a limitation in some regards and provide sensible arguments. But then again, they were also the same people who told everyone that they believe unified shaders are not the future for high performance GPUs back when ATI introduced them for the first time as well.



nguyen said:


> Here is how GTX 980 perform in FS 2020, a game that will fill any VRAM available



It wont do that on 1080p, nice diversion.





The 980 or any other 4GB card isn't even included, you can guess why. You should have also read what they said :



> *1080p ultra is the last setting where it even remotely made sense to test all of Nvidia's x80 model graphics cards, so let's do a quick look at generational performance again. The GTX 780 struggles mightily, only putting up 16 fps. GTX 980 is also held back by its limited VRAM, delivering 27% more performance than the 780 but still only reaching 21 fps. The jump to the 1080 with 8GB is much larger now: nearly double the performance (89% faster) at 39 fps.*



The evidence that VRAM is a real limiting factor is everywhere, you just have to stop truing a blind eye to it.


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## londiste (Sep 20, 2020)

Vya Domus said:


> With every generation of consoles memory requirements ballooned, it happened with PS3/360, it also happened with PS4/Xbox One. Why are people convinced that it's not going to happen this time around is beyond me.


Ballooned? This generation is decidedly different when it comes to ballooning memory size.
- Xbox: 64 MB > Xbox 360: 512MB > Xbox One/X: 8/12GB > Xbox Series S/X: 10/16GB (8/10GB fast RAM)
- PS: 2+1MB > PS2: 32+4MB > PS3: 256+256MB > PS4: 8GB (+256MB/1GB) > PS5: 16GB
In percentages:
+700% > +1500% > +25%
+1100% > +1322% > +1550% > +93%


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## Mussels (Sep 20, 2020)

Damnit all this talk of VRAM compression makes me wanna ask w1zzard to do a generational testing with the biggest VRAM card of each gen, once we have big navi and the 3090 out to see

1. How much gen on gen improvement there is in each camp
2. how much VRAM he can eat out of a 24GB card
3. what it takes to finally make him cry


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## Dyatlov A (Sep 20, 2020)

InVasMani said:


> It's not listed, but could see a RTX 3060S 16GB being possible as well eventually. That probably depends a lot on the memory controller bandwidth however, but knowing Nvidia if they can get some better binned GDDR chips down the road they'd slap on the extra ram density and faster chips and start selling them to fill whatever gaps can.



why would you need more than 10GB memory?


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## nguyen (Sep 20, 2020)

Vya Domus said:


> With every generation of consoles memory requirements ballooned, it happened with PS3/360, it also happened with PS4/Xbox One. Why are people convinced that it's not going to happen this time around is beyond me.
> 
> Nvidia's marketing is top notch, of course they would never admit that VRAM is going to be a limitation in some regards and provide sensible arguments. But then again, they were also the same people who told everyone that they believe unified shaders are not the future for high performance GPUs back when ATI introduced them for the first time as well.
> It wont do that on 1080p, nice diversion.
> ...



And somehow lowering the detail from Ultra to High is too hard for you ?
Also you can see 2060 6GB being faster than 1080 8GB there, even at 4K Ultra. Nvidia improves the memory compression algorithm every generation that 8GB VRAM on Ampere does not act the same way as 8GB VRAM on Turing or Pascal (AMD is even further off).










Just look at the VRAM usage between 2080 Ti vs 3080, the 3080 always use less VRAM, that how Nvidia memory compression works...

I would rather have a hypothetical 3080 Ti with 12GB VRAM on 384 bit bus rather than 20GB VRAM on 320bit bus, bandwidth over useless capacity anyday. At least higher VRAM bandwidth will instantly give higher performance on today games, not 5 years down the line when these 3080 can be had for 200usd...


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## basco (Sep 20, 2020)

would really like to know a gtx 780 3gb versus 6gb outcome.
i know its old tech but i think if i can get a cheap 6gb card .......


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## Vya Domus (Sep 20, 2020)

nguyen said:


> And somehow lowering the detail from Ultra to High is too hard for you ?



On a mid range card or a high end one from 6 years ago ? No, it wouldn't be. Having to do that with a high end card that you bought today a year or two from now, it would be kind of pathetic.



nguyen said:


> I would rather have a hypothetical 3080 Ti with 12GB VRAM on 384 bit bus rather than 20GB VRAM on 320bit bus, bandwidth over useless capacity anyday.



Wouldn't you rather stick with the 10GB ? I get the sense that all this extra VRAM would be useless, so why would you want something with more memory ?



nguyen said:


> Just look at the VRAM usage between 2080 Ti vs 3080, the 3080 always use less VRAM, that how Nvidia memory compression works...



That's not how memory compression works at all, the memory that you see there is allocated memory. The compression takes place internally onto the GPU on some level, in other words the 1 GB that was allocated has to remain visible and be addressed as 1GB at all times otherwise it would break the application. So the effects of the compression are not visible to the outside application. The compression is only used on color data anyway, which is only a portion of what you need to render a scene so a lot of the data isn't actually compressible.

That being said the reason more memory is used on the 2080ti is because the more memory available the more allocations are going to take place. Similar to how Windows is going to report higher memory usage when more RAM is available. Memory allocation requests are queued up and may not take place at the exact time they are issued by the application.


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## ppn (Sep 20, 2020)

3080 doesnt have 5 years before it can be had for $200. GTX 780 3GB was humiliated by GTX 970 only 500 days later not to mention 780Ti that didnt last for 300 days before getting slashed in half.

even if Nvidia released 3080 with 384bit bus I still  wouldn't buy it. save the money for later when we can have a decent 1008TBs 12GB card on 6nm EUV that clocks 30% higher.


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## AusWolf (Sep 20, 2020)

Valantar said:


> The Xbox Series X has 16Gb of RAM, of which 2.5GB is reserved for the OS and the remaining 13.5GB is available for software. 10GB of those 13.5 are of the full bandwidth (560GB/s?) variety, with the remaining 3.5GB being slower due to that console's odd two-tiered RAM configuration. That (likely) means that games will _at the very most_ use 10GB of VRAM, though the split between game RAM usage and VRAM is very likely not going to be 3.5:10. Those would be edge cases at the very best. Sony hasn't disclosed this kind of data, but given that the PS5 has a less powerful GPU, it certainly isn't going to need more VRAM than the XSX.


Comparing consoles to PCs is like apples and pears. For one: consoles use software totally differently than PCs, they often come with locked resolutions and frame rates, etc. For two: no console's performance has ever risen above that of a mid-range PC from the same era, and I don't think it's ever gonna change (mostly due to price and size/cooling restrictions). Devs tweak game settings to accommodate to hardware specifications on consoles, whereas on PC, you have the freedom to use whatever settings you like.

Example: playing The Witcher 3 on an Xbox One with washed out textures at 900p is not the same as playing it on a similarly aged high-end PC with ultra settings at 1080p or 1440p.


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## nguyen (Sep 20, 2020)

Vya Domus said:


> On a mid range card or a high end one from 6 years ago ? No, it wouldn't be. Having to do that with a high end card that you bought today a year or two from now, it would be kind of pathetic.
> Wouldn't you rather stick with the 10GB ? I get the sense that all this extra VRAM would be useless, so why would you want something with more memory ?



For 100-200usd more I would get a hypothetical 3080 Ti with 12GB VRAM on 384bit bus, not the 3080 with 20GB . However this 3080 Ti would jeopardize 3090 sale so I'm guessing Nvidia would release them much later.

The 3080 PCB already has the space for 2 extra VRAM modules






I had to lower some details on pretty much top of the line GPUs like Titan X Maxwell, 1080 Ti and 2080 Ti during the first year of owning them, not even at 4K. Ultra details setting is pretty much only used for benchmarks, IRL people tend to prefer higher FPS rather than some IQ you can't distinguish unless zooming 4x into a recording LOL.










The new norm for 2021 onward should be RT Reflections + High Details, let just hope so


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## londiste (Sep 20, 2020)

AusWolf said:


> For one: consoles use software totally differently than PCs, they often come with locked resolutions and frame rates, etc. For two: no console's performance has ever risen above that of a mid-range PC from the same era, and I don't think it's ever gonna change (mostly due to price and size/cooling restrictions). Devs tweak game settings to accommodate to hardware specifications on consoles, whereas on PC, you have the freedom to use whatever settings you like.


That used to be true maybe even 2 generations ago but today consoles practically are PC's. x86 CPUs, GPUs on mainstream architectures, common buses, RAM etc. XB1/XBX and upcoming XBSX/XBSS are running on Windows kernel and DirectX APIs, Sony is running FreeBSD-based OS with partially custom APIs. If there were not artificial restrictions to keep the console garden walls in place, me and you could run all that on our hardware. Resolutions and frame rates, as well as the game setting are up to the developer and only benefit for consoles is the predefined spec - optimizing game to a specific machine or two is much much easier than creating the low-medium-high-ultra settings that work well across swaths of different hardware.

Console performances have been above midrange PC of the same era in the past - PS3/Xbox360 were at the level of (very) high-end PC at launch. PS4/XB1 were (or at least seemed to be)  an outlier with decidedly mediocre hardware. XBSX/PS5 are at the level of high-end hardware as of half a year ago when their specs were finalized which is back to normal. XBSS is kind of the weird red-headed stepchild that gets bare minimum and we'll have to see how it fares. PC hardware performance ceiling has been climbing for a while now. Yes, high-end stuff is getting incredibly expensive and gets worse and worse in terms of bang-per-buck but it is getting relatively more and more powerful as well.


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## TumbleGeorge (Sep 20, 2020)

> Consoles...


Unreal Engine 5? Next DX "superultimate"? 8k; Nvidia Hopper; AMD RDNA3/4; GDDR7; HBM3(+)/4...to get your money!
Has many reasons to put RTX 30xx with "small" or "big" VRAM size in history. Regardless of whether and to what extent they are justified.


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## Valantar (Sep 20, 2020)

AusWolf said:


> Comparing consoles to PCs is like apples and pears. For one: consoles use software totally differently than PCs, they often come with locked resolutions and frame rates, etc. For two: no console's performance has ever risen above that of a mid-range PC from the same era, and I don't think it's ever gonna change (mostly due to price and size/cooling restrictions). Devs tweak game settings to accommodate to hardware specifications on consoles, whereas on PC, you have the freedom to use whatever settings you like.
> 
> Example: playing The Witcher 3 on an Xbox One with washed out textures at 900p is not the same as playing it on a similarly aged high-end PC with ultra settings at 1080p or 1440p.


I wasn't the one starting with the console-to-PC comparisons here, I was just responding. Besides, comparing the upcoming consoles to previous generations is ... tricky. Not only are they architecturally more similar to PCs than ever (true, the current generation are also X86+AMD GPU, but nobody ever gamed on a Jaguar CPU), but unlike last time both console vendors are investing significantly in hardware (the PS4 at launch performed about the same as a lower midrange dGPU, at the time a ~$150 product; upcoming consoles will likely perform similarly to the 2070S (and probably 3060), a $500 product). No previous console's performance has risen above a mid-range PC from the same era, but the upcoming ones are definitely trying to change that. Besides that, did I ever say that playing a game at on a console at one resolution was the same as playing the same game on a PC at a different one? Nice straw man you've got there. Stop putting words in my mouth. The point of making console comparisons this time around is that there has never been a closer match between consoles and PCs in terms of actual performance than what we will have this November.


Vayra86 said:


> There you have it. Who decided PC dGPU is developed for a 3 year life cycle? It certainly wasn't us. They last double that time without any hiccups whatsoever, and even then hold resale value. Especially the high end. I'll take 4-5 if you don't mind. The 1080 I'm running now, makes 4-5 just fine, and then some. The 780ti I had prior, did similar, and they both had life in them still.
> 
> Two GPU upgrades per console gen is utterly ridiculous and unnecessary, since we all know the real jumps happen with real console gen updates.


Well, don't blame me, I didn't make GPU vendors think like this. Heck, I'm still happily using my Fury X (though it is starting to struggle enough at 1440p that it's time to retire it, but I'm very happy with its five-year lifespan). I would say this stems from being in a highly competitive market that has historically had dramatic shifts in performance in relatively short time spans, combined with relatively open software ecosystems (the latter of which consoles have avoided, thus avoiding the short term one-upmanship of the GPU market). That makes software a constantly moving target, and thus we get the chicken-and-egg-like race of more demanding games requiring faster GPUs allowing for even more demanding games requiring even faster GPUs, etc., etc. Of course, as the industry matures those time spans are growing, and given slowdowns in both architectural improvements and manufacturing nodes any high end GPU from today is likely to remain relevant for _at least_ five years, though likely longer, and at a far higher quality of life for users than previous ones.

That being said, future-proofing by adding more VRAM is a poor solution. Sure, the GPU needs to have _enough_ VRAM, there is no question about that. It needs an amount of VRAM and a bandwidth that both complement the computational power of the GPU, otherwise it will quickly become bottlenecked. The issue is that VRAM density and bandwidth both scale (very!) poorly with time  - heck, base DRAM die clocks haven't really moved for a decade or more, with only more advanced ways of packing more data into the same signal increasing transfer speeds. But adding more RAM is very expensive too - heck, the huge framebuffers of current GPUs are a lot of the reason for high end GPUs today being $700-1500 rather than the $200-400 of a decade ago - die density has just barely moved, bandwidth is still an issue, requiring more complex and expensive PCBs, etc. I would be quite surprised if the BOM cost of the VRAM on the 3080 is below $200. Which then begs the question: would it really be worth it to pay $1000 for a 3080 20GB rather than $700 for a 3080 10GB, when there would be no perceptible performance difference for the vast majority of its useful lifetime?

The last question is particularly relevant when you start to look at VRAM usage scaling and comparing the memory sizes in question to previous generations where buying the highest VRAM SKU has been smart. Remember, scaling on the same with bus is either 1x or 2x (or potentially 4x I guess), so like we're discussing here, the only possible step is to 20GB - which brings with it a _very_ significant cost increase. The base SKU has 10GB, which is the second highest memory count of any consumer-facing GPU in history. Even if it's comparable to the likely GPU-allocated amount of RAM on upcoming consoles, it's still a very decent chunk. On the other hand, previous GPUs with different memory capacities have started out _much_ lower - 3/6GB for the 1060, 4/8GB for a whole host of others, and 2/4GB for quite a few if you look far enough back. The thing here is: while the percentage increases are always the same, the absolute amount of VRAM now is _massively_ higher than in those cases - the baseline we're currently talking about is higher than the high end option of the previous comparisons. What does that mean? For one, you're already operating at such a high level of performance that there's a lot of leeway for tuning and optimization. If a game requires 1GB more VRAM than what's available, lowering settings to fit that within a 10GB framebuffer will be trivial. Doing the same on a 3GB card? Pretty much impossible. A 2GB reduction in VRAM needs is likely more easily done on a 10GB framebuffer than a .5GB reduction on a 3GB framebuffer. After all, there is a baseline requirement that is _necessary_ for the game to run, onto which additional quality options add more. Raising the ceiling for maximum VRAM doesn't as much shift the baseline requirement upwards (though that too creeps upwards over time) as it expands the range of possible working configurations. Sure, 2GB is largely insufficient for 1080p today, but 3GB is still fine, and 4GB is plenty (at settings where GPUs with these amounts of VRAM would actually be able to deliver playable framerates). So you previously had a scale from, say, .5-4GB, then 2-8GB, and in the future maybe 4-12GB. Again, looking at percentages is misleading, as it takes a lot of work to fill those last few GB. And the higher you go, the easier it is to ease off on a setting or two without perceptibly losing quality. I.e. your experience will not change whatsoever, except that the game will (likely automatically) lower a couple of settings a single notch.

Of course, in the time it will take for 10GB to become a real limitation at 4k - I would say _at minimum_ three years - the 3080 will likely not have the shader performance to keep up anyhow, making the entire question moot. Lowering settings will thus become a necessity no matter the VRAM amount.

So, what will you then be paying for with a 3080 20GB? Likely 8GB of VRAM that will never see practical use (again, it will more than likely have stuff allocated to it, but it won't be _used_ in gameplay), and the luxury of keeping a couple of settings pegged to the max rather than lowering them imperceptibly. That might be worth it to you, but it certainly isn't for me. In fact, I'd say it's a complete waste of money.


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## AusWolf (Sep 20, 2020)

londiste said:


> That used to be true maybe even 2 generations ago but today consoles practically are PC's. x86 CPUs, GPUs on mainstream architectures, common buses, RAM etc. XB1/XBX and upcoming XBSX/XBSS are running on Windows kernel and DirectX APIs, Sony is running FreeBSD-based OS with partially custom APIs. If there were not artificial restrictions to keep the console garden walls in place, me and you could run all that on our hardware. Resolutions and frame rates, as well as the game setting are up to the developer and only benefit for consoles is the predefined spec - optimizing game to a specific machine or two is much much easier than creating the low-medium-high-ultra settings that work well across swaths of different hardware.


This is true.


londiste said:


> Console performances have been above midrange PC of the same era in the past - PS3/Xbox360 were at the level of (very) high-end PC at launch. PS4/XB1 were (or at least seemed to be)  an outlier with decidedly mediocre hardware. XBSX/PS5 are at the level of high-end hardware as of half a year ago when their specs were finalized which is back to normal. XBSS is kind of the weird red-headed stepchild that gets bare minimum and we'll have to see how it fares. PC hardware performance ceiling has been climbing for a while now. Yes, high-end stuff is getting incredibly expensive and gets worse and worse in terms of bang-per-buck but it is getting relatively more and more powerful as well.


I disagree. To stay with my original example, The Witcher 3 (a game from 2015) ran on the Xbox One (a late 2013 machine) with reduced quality settings at 900p to keep frame rates acceptable. Back in that time, I had an AMD FX-8150 (no need to mention how bad that CPU was for gaming) and a Radeon HD 7970 which was the flagship AMD card in early 2012. I could still run the game at 1080p with ultra settings (except for hairworks) between 40-60 FPS depending on the scene.

It's true that consoles get more and more powerful with every generation, but so do PCs, and I honestly can't see a $500 machine beat a $2,000 one ever. And thus, game devs will always have to impose limitations to make games run as smoothly on consoles as they do on high-end PCs, making the two basically incomparable, even in terms of VRAM requirements.


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## londiste (Sep 20, 2020)

Valantar said:


> No previous console's performance has risen above a mid-range PC from the same era, but the upcoming ones are definitely trying to change that.


Like I said, PS4/XB1 generation seems to be a fluke. We only need to look at the generation before that:
- PS3's (Nov 2006) RSX is basically hybrid of 7800GTX (June 2005, $600) and 7900GTX (March 2006, $500).
- XBox360's (Nov 2005) Xenos is X1800/X1900 hybrid with X1800XL (Oct 2005, $450) probably the closest match.

While more difficult to compare, CPUs were high-end as well. Athlon 64 X2s came out in mid-2005. PowerPC-based CPUs in both consoles were pretty nicely multithreaded before that was a mainstream thing for PCs.


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## ppn (Sep 20, 2020)

3080 20G has 1536 more shaders and possibly SLi, not the same card at all. 10G is just perfect if you find the right balance that varies game to game. But can't under volt it 0.95 at stock 1960, overclock is nonexistent. Twice as fast as 2070 at twice the power, powerhog. Fastest card, but if 2070 barely can do 1440/60, no way 3080 is 4k 120, not possible, low texture esport games only.


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## AusWolf (Sep 20, 2020)

Valantar said:


> I wasn't the one starting with the console-to-PC comparisons here, I was just responding. Besides, comparing the upcoming consoles to previous generations is ... tricky. Not only are they architecturally more similar to PCs than ever (true, the current generation are also X86+AMD GPU, but nobody ever gamed on a Jaguar CPU), but unlike last time both console vendors are investing significantly in hardware (the PS4 at launch performed about the same as a lower midrange dGPU, at the time a ~$150 product; upcoming consoles will likely perform similarly to the 2070S (and probably 3060), a $500 product). No previous console's performance has risen above a mid-range PC from the same era, but the upcoming ones are definitely trying to change that. Besides that, did I ever say that playing a game at on a console at one resolution was the same as playing the same game on a PC at a different one? Nice straw man you've got there. Stop putting words in my mouth. The point of making console comparisons this time around is that there has never been a closer match between consoles and PCs in terms of actual performance than what we will have this November.


I'm not putting words into your mouth, I know you weren't the one starting this train of thought. 

All I tried to say is, there's no point in drawing conclusions regarding VRAM requirements on PC based on how much RAM the newest Xbox and Playstation have _(regardless of who started the conversation)_. Game devs can always tweak settings to make games playable on consoles, while on PC you have the freedom to choose from an array of graphics settings to suit your needs.


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## Legacy-ZA (Sep 20, 2020)

I hope the 3060Ti will have at least 12GB VRAM.


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## londiste (Sep 20, 2020)

AusWolf said:


> All I tried to say is, there's no point in drawing conclusions regarding VRAM requirements on PC based on how much RAM the newest Xbox and Playstation have _(regardless of who started the conversation)_. Game devs can always tweak settings to make games playable on consoles, while on PC you have the freedom to choose from an array of graphics settings to suit your needs.


VRAM requirement today depends most notably on one thing - texture pool, usually exposed as texture quality setting. Game assets - such as textures - are normally the same (or close enough) across different platforms. Texture pool nowadays is almost always dynamic, there is an allocated bunch of VRAM where textures are constantly loaded into and unloaded based on whatever scheme dev deemed good enough.


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## Vayra86 (Sep 20, 2020)

londiste said:


> VRAM requirement today depends most notably on one thing - texture pool, usually exposed as texture quality setting. Game assets - such as textures - are normally the same (or close enough) across different platforms. Texture pool nowadays is almost always dynamic, there is an allocated bunch of VRAM where textures are constantly loaded into and unloaded based on whatever scheme dev deemed good enough.



Its a bit like how World of Warcraft evolved. No matter how silly you play, everyone can feel like their stuff runs like a boss and call it the real thing.


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## efikkan (Sep 20, 2020)

Mussels said:


> Damnit all this talk of VRAM compression makes me wanna ask w1zzard to do a generational testing with the biggest VRAM card of each gen, once we have big navi and the 3090 out to see
> 
> 1. How much gen on gen improvement there is in each camp
> 2. how much VRAM he can eat out of a 24GB card
> 3. what it takes to finally make him cry


Be aware that the VRAM usage reported by the driver doesn't tell you everything, as the actual memory usage can vary a lot during a single frame. Temporary buffers are used a lot during multiple render passes, and are usually allocated once, but flushed and compressed during a single frame. Also, be aware that some games may allocate a lot of extra VRAM without it being strictly necessary.

The best way to find out whether you have enough VRAM or not is to find the spot where you can measure symptoms of insufficient VRAM, primarily by measuring frame time consistency. Insufficient VRAM will usually cause significant stutter and sometimes even glitching.


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## lexluthermiester (Sep 20, 2020)

Vya Domus said:


> Having to do that with a high end card that you bought today a year or two from now, it would be kind of pathetic.


No, it wouldn't. Software devs often create titles that push the performance envelope further than is currently viable. Crysis anyone? At a time when 1080p was becoming the standard, they released a game that would only run well if you ran at 720p with settings turned down and that was on brand new, top shelf hardware. Even the very next generation of hardware struggled to run Crysis at 1080p@60hz. Things have not changed. This simple and universal rule is: If you're not getting the performance you desire, adjust your settings down until performance is acceptable to you. Everyone has a different idea of what "acceptable" actually is.

As for the debate that keeps repeating itself with every new generation of hardware, RAM. Folks, just because @W1zzard did not encounter any issues with 10GB of VRAM in the testing done at this time does *not* mean that 10GB will remain enough in the future(near or otherwise). Technology always progresses. And software often precedes hardware. Therefore, if you buy a card now that has a certain amount of RAM on it and you just go with bog standard you may find yourself coming up short in performance later. 10GB seems like a lot now. But then so did 2GB just a few years ago. Shortsighted planning always ends poorly. Just ask the people that famously said "No one will ever need more that 640k of RAM."

A 3060, 3070 or 3080 with 12GB, 16GB or 20GB of VRAM is not a waste. It is an option that offers a level of future proofing. For most people that is an important factor because they only ever buy a new GPU every 3 or 4 years. They need all the future-proofing they can get. And before anyone says "Future-proofing is a pipe-dream and a waste of time.", put a cork in that pie-hole. Future-proofing a PC purchase by making strategic choices of hardware is a long practiced and well honored buying methodology.


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## ppn (Sep 20, 2020)

12, 16, 20GB are not going to make sense.
20GB is $300 more expensive, for what. so that at unclear point  in the future, when it would be obsolete anyway, so you could be granted one more game that runs a little better.
16GB price is very close to the 10GB card so you have to trade 30% less performance for 6GB more. I mean you are deliberately going to make a worse choice again because of some future uncertainty.
12GB only AMD will make a 192 bit card at this point. 3060 will be as weak as 2070. so why put 12GB on it.


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## lexluthermiester (Sep 21, 2020)

ppn said:


> 20GB is $300 more expensive





ppn said:


> 16GB price is very close to the 10GB card


Rubbish! You don't and can't know any of that. Exact card models and prices have not been announced. Additionally, history shows those conclusions have no merit.

Example? The GTX770. The 2GB version is pretty much unusable for modern games, but the 4GB versions are still relevant as they are still playable because of the additional VRAM. Even though the GPU dies are the same, the extra VRAM make all the difference. And it made a big difference then too. The cost? A mere $35 extra over the 2GB version. The same has been true throughout the history of GPU's regardless of who made them.


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## Nkd (Sep 21, 2020)

Ofcourse they will. But people seem to forget and not realize that its already a known fact the 2gb chips won't be available until 2021. So we probably won't see these cards until January or December the earliest if they rush them.


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## moproblems99 (Sep 21, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> Didnt that same game exist during the release of a 2080ti?



How much did the 2080 have that this is a direct replacement for though?  Really gained vram this gen.


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## Minus Infinity (Sep 21, 2020)

Big Navi not even released and they are panicking already. Would have thought this would be part of the mid-life update. Anyway 10Gb or 20GB you won't be getting one soon.


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## Valantar (Sep 21, 2020)

lexluthermiester said:


> A 3060, 3070 or 3080 with 12GB, 16GB or 20GB of VRAM is not a waste. It is an option that offers a level of future proofing. For most people that is an important factor because they only ever buy a new GPU every 3 or 4 years. They need all the future-proofing they can get. And before anyone says "Future-proofing is a pipe-dream and a waste of time.", put a cork in that pie-hole. Future-proofing a PC purchase by making strategic choices of hardware is a long practiced and well honored buying methodology.


That isn't really the question though - the question is whether the amount of VRAM will become a noticeable bottleneck in cases where shader performance isn't. And that, even though this card is obviously a beast, is quite unlikely. Compute requirements typically increase _faster_ than VRAM requirements (if for no other reason that the amount of VRAM on common GPUs increases very slowly, forcing developers to keep VRAM usage somewhat reasonable), so this GPU is far more likely to be bottlenecked by its core and architecture rather than having "only" 10GB of VRAM. So you'll be forced to lower settings for reasons other than running out of VRAM in most situations. And, as I said above, with a VRAM pool that large, you have _massive_ room for adjusting a couple of settings down to stay within the limitations of the framebuffer should such a situation occur.

Your comparison to the 770 is as such a false equivalency: that comparison must then also assume that GPUs in the (relatively near) future will have >10GB of VRAM _as a minimum_, as that is what would be required for this amount to truly become a bottleneck. The modern titles you speak of need >2/<4 GB of VRAM to run smoothly at 1080p. Even the lowest end GPUs today come in 4GB SKUs, and two generations back, while you did have 2 and 3GB low-end options, nearly everything even then was 4GB or more. For your comparison to be valid, the same situation must then be true in the relatively near future, only 2GB gets replaced with 10GB. And that isn't happening. Baseline requirements for games are not going to exceed 10GB of VRAM in any reasonably relevant future. VRAM is simply too expensive for that - it would make the cheapest GPUs around cost $500 or more - DRAM bit pricing isn't budging. Not to mention that the VRAM creep past 2GB has taken _years_. To expect a sudden jump of, say, >3x (assuming ~3GB today) in a few years? That would be an extremely dramatic change compared to the only relevant history we have to compare to.

Besides, you (and many others here) seem to be mixing up two similar but still different questions:
a) Will 10GB be enough to not bottleneck the rest of this GPU during its usable lifespan? (i.e. "can it run Ultra settings until I upgrade?") and
b) Will 10GB be enough to not make this GPU unusable in 2-3 generations? (i.e. "will this be a dud in X years?")

Question a) is at least worth discussing, and I would say "maybe not, but it's a limitation that can be easily overcome by changing a few settings (and gaming at Ultra is kind of silly anyhow), and at those settings you'll likely encounter other limitations beyond VRAM". Question b), which is what you are alluding to with your GTX 770 reference, is pretty much out of the question, as baseline requirements (i.e. "can it run games at all?") aren't going to exceed 10GB in the next decade no matter what. Will you be able to play at 4k medium-high settings at reasonable frame rates with 10GB of VRAM in a decade? No - that would be unprecedented. But will you be able to play 1080p or 1440p at those types of settings with 10GB of VRAM? Almost undoubtedly (though shader performance is likely to force you to lower settings - but not the VRAM). And if you're expecting future-proofing to keep your GPU relevant at that kind of performance level for that kind of time, your expectations of what is possible is fundamentally flawed. The other parts of the GPU will be holding you back far more than the VRAM in that scenario. If the size of your framebuffer is making your five-year-old high-end GPU run at a spiky 10fps instead of, say, 34, does that matter at all? Unless the game in question is extremely slow-paced, you'd need to lower settings anyhow to get a reasonable framerate, which will then in all likelihood bring you below the 10GB limitation.

I'm all for future-proofing, and I absolutely hate the shortsighted hypermaterialism of the PC building scene - there's a reason I've kept my current GPU for five years - but adding $2-300 (high end GDDR chips cost somewhere in the realm of $20/GB) to the cost of a part to add something that in all likelihood won't add to its longevity at all is _not_ smart future-proofing. If you're paying that to avoid one bottleneck just to be held back by another, you've overpaid for an unbalanced product.


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## Vayra86 (Sep 21, 2020)

Valantar said:


> That isn't really the question though - the question is whether the amount of VRAM will become a noticeable bottleneck in cases where shader performance isn't. And that, even though this card is obviously a beast, is quite unlikely. Compute requirements typically increase _faster_ than VRAM requirements (if for no other reason that the amount of VRAM on common GPUs increases very slowly, forcing developers to keep VRAM usage somewhat reasonable), so this GPU is far more likely to be bottlenecked by its core and architecture rather than having "only" 10GB of VRAM. So you'll be forced to lower settings for reasons other than running out of VRAM in most situations. And, as I said above, with a VRAM pool that large, you have _massive_ room for adjusting a couple of settings down to stay within the limitations of the framebuffer should such a situation occur.
> 
> Your comparison to the 770 is as such a false equivalency: that comparison must then also assume that GPUs in the (relatively near) future will have >10GB of VRAM _as a minimum_, as that is what would be required for this amount to truly become a bottleneck. The modern titles you speak of need >2/<4 GB of VRAM to run smoothly at 1080p. Even the lowest end GPUs today come in 4GB SKUs, and two generations back, while you did have 2 and 3GB low-end options, nearly everything even then was 4GB or more. For your comparison to be valid, the same situation must then be true in the relatively near future, only 2GB gets replaced with 10GB. And that isn't happening. Baseline requirements for games are not going to exceed 10GB of VRAM in any reasonably relevant future. VRAM is simply too expensive for that - it would make the cheapest GPUs around cost $500 or more - DRAM bit pricing isn't budging. Not to mention that the VRAM creep past 2GB has taken _years_. To expect a sudden jump of, say, >3x (assuming ~3GB today) in a few years? That would be an extremely dramatic change compared to the only relevant history we have to compare to.
> 
> ...



I'm just going to leave this, *1440p*, 60 FPS Skyrim SE video here and leave you all to your thoughts on this dilemma. Enjoy that 10GB "4K" card at 1440p. In the 'day before yesterday's' content at a lower res than what the card is marketed for.

Its not exactly the most niche game either... I guess 'Enthusiast' only goes as far as the limits Nvidia PR set for you with each release? Curious  Alongside this, I want to stress again TWO previous generations had weaker cards with 11GB. They'd run this game better than a new release, most likely.

Since its a well known game, we also know how the engine responds when VRAM is short. You get stutter, and its not pretty. Been there done that way back on a 770 with measly 2GB. Same shit, same game, different day.

So sure, if all you care about is playing every console port and you never mod anything, 10GB will do you fine. But a 3070 will then probably do the same thing for you, won't it? Nvidia's cost cutting measure works both ways, really. We can do it too. Between a 3080 with 20GB (at whatever price point it gets) and a 3070 with 8GB, the 3080 10GB is in a very weird place. Add consoles and a big Navi chip with 16GB and it gets utterly strange, if not 'the odd one out'. A bit like the place where SLI is now. Writing's on the wall.














moproblems99 said:


> How much did the 2080 have that this is a direct replacement for though?  Really gained vram this gen.



The 2080 is also 40-50% slower. 20% VRAM, 40-50% core? Sounds like good balance after the 2080S was already rivalling 1080ti's core power while being 3GB short.

The balance is shifting and its well known there is tremendous pressure on production lines for high end RAM. We're paying the price with reduced lifecycles on expensive product. That is the real thing happening here.


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## nguyen (Sep 21, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> I'm just going to leave this, *1440p*, 60 FPS Skyrim SE video here and leave you all to your thoughts on this dilemma. Enjoy that 10GB "4K" card at 1440p. In the 'day before yesterday's' content at a lower res than what the card is marketed for.
> 
> Its not exactly the most niche game either... I guess 'Enthusiast' only goes as far as the limits Nvidia PR set for you with each release? Curious  Alongside this, I want to stress again TWO previous generations had weaker cards with 11GB. They'd run this game better than a new release, most likely.
> 
> ...



LOL, FS 2020 would like to join the chat







Radeon VII performance number ?






Funny that Radeon VII is faster than 1080 Ti and Titan XP while slower than 2070 Super, 2080 and 2080 Super there.


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## Vayra86 (Sep 21, 2020)

nguyen said:


> LOL, FS 2020 would like to join the chat
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Cities Skylines is fun too 



ppn said:


> 12, 16, 20GB are not going to make sense.
> 20GB is $300 more expensive, for what. so that at unclear point  in the future, when it would be obsolete anyway, so you could be granted one more game that runs a little better.
> 16GB price is very close to the 10GB card so you have to trade 30% less performance for 6GB more. I mean you are deliberately going to make a worse choice again because of some future uncertainty.
> 12GB only AMD will make a 192 bit card at this point. 3060 will be as weak as 2070. so why put 12GB on it.



The real point here is that Nvidia has not really found the best balance with Ampere on this node. The fact they decided upon these weird VRAM configs is telling. Why the 10/20 GB split at all, why force yourself to double it right away? They've been much more creative with this before on more refined nodes. I'm definitely not spending more than 500 on this gen, and that is a stretch already.

3080 10GB is going to be a mighty fine, super future proof 1440p product. 4K? Nope. Unless you like it faked with blurry shit all over the place in due time. Its unfortunate though that 1440p and 4K don't play nicely together with res scaling on your monitor.


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## Valantar (Sep 21, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> I'm just going to leave this, *1440p*, 60 FPS Skyrim SE video here and leave you all to your thoughts on this dilemma. Enjoy that 10GB "4K" card at 1440p. In the 'day before yesterday's' content at a lower res than what the card is marketed for.
> 
> Its not exactly the most niche game either... I guess 'Enthusiast' only goes as far as the limits Nvidia PR set for you with each release? Curious  Alongside this, I want to stress again TWO previous generations had weaker cards with 11GB. They'd run this game better than a new release, most likely.
> 
> ...


... and here we go again, 'round and 'round we go. This seems to need repeating ad infinitum: _VRAM allocation does not equate to VRAM in use_. Yet VRAM allocation is what monitoring software can see. So unless you are able to test the same game on an otherwise identical GPU with less VRAM and show it actually performing worse, this proves nothing beyond that the game is able to allocate a bunch of data that it might never use. Most game engines will aggressively allocate data to VRAM on the off chance that the data in question might be used - but the vast majority of it isn't.

Which is why DirectStorage exists, as its _sole purpose_ is to make games quit this stupid behavior through allowing for faster streaming, incentivizing streaming in _what is actually needed_ just before it's needed rather than accounting for every possible eventuality well before it might possibly happen as they do now. Given how important consoles are for game development, DS adoption will be widespread in the near future - well within the useful lifetime of the 3080. And VRAM allocations will as such _shrink _with its usage. Is it possible developers will use this now-free VRAM for higher quality textures and the like? Sure, that might happen, but it will take a lot of time. And it will of course increase the stress on the GPU's ability to process textures rather than its ability to keep them available, moving the bottleneck elsewhere. Also, seeing how Skyrim has already been remastered, if developers patched in DS support to help modders it really wouldn't be that big of a surprise.

Besides, using the most notoriously heavily modded game in the world to exemplify realistic VRAM usage scenarios? Yeah, that's representative. Sure. And of course, mod developers are focused on and skilled at keeping VRAM usage reasonable, right? Or maybe, just maybe, some of them are _only_ focused at making their mod work, whatever the cost? I mean, pretty much any game with a notable amount of graphical mods can be modded to be unplayable on any GPU in existence. If that's your benchmark, no GPU will ever be sufficient for anything and you might as well give up. If your example of a representative use case is an extreme edge case, then it stands to reason that your components also need configurations that are - wait for it - not representative of the overall gaming scene. If your aim is to play Skyrim with enough mods that it eats VRAM for breakfast, then yes, you need more VRAM than pretty much anyone else. Go figure.

And again: you are - outright! - mixing up the two questions from my post, positing a negative answer to a) as also necessitating a negative answer to b). _Please_ stop doing that. They are not the same question, and they aren't even directly related. _All_ GPUs require you to lower settings to keep using them over time. Exactly which settings and how much depends on the exact configuration of the GPU in question. This does not mean that the GPU becomes unusable due to a singular bottleneck, as has been the case with a few GPUs over time. If 10GB of VRAM forces you to ever so slightly lower the settings on your heavily modded Skyrim build - well, then do so. And keep playing. It doesn't mean that you can't play, nor does it mean that you can't mod. Besides, if (going by your screenshot) it runs at 60fps on ... a 2080Ti? 1080Ti?, then congrats, you can now play at 90-120fps on the same settings? Isn't that pretty decent?


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## Mussels (Sep 21, 2020)

Dont forget that going up in resolution wont change the VRAM usage much, if at all unless the game has higher res textures - so for example loading a 4K texture mod will be fairly similar at 1080p vs 4k, cause.... tada, the textures are at 4k.

If 10G or 11GB isnt enough for a certain title, just turn the friggin textures to ultra. I cant wait to see people cry over 'can it run crysis?' mode because waaaaah, max settings waaaah.


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## Valantar (Sep 21, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> The real point here is that Nvidia has not really found the best balance with Ampere on this node. The fact they decided upon these weird VRAM configs is telling. Why the 10/20 GB split at all, why force yourself to double it right away? They've been much more creative with this before on more refined nodes. I'm definitely not spending more than 500 on this gen, and that is a stretch already.
> 
> 3080 10GB is going to be a mighty fine, super future proof 1440p product. 4K? Nope. Unless you like it faked with blurry shit all over the place in due time. Its unfortunate though that 1440p and 4K don't play nicely together with res scaling on your monitor.


What? The production node of the chip has zero relation to the amount of VRAM (as long as you're able to fit the necessary amount of channels on the physical die, but that's more down to die size than the node as physical interconnects scale quite poorly with node changes). They didn't "force [themselves] to double" anything - GDDR6X exists in 1GB or 2GB chips (well, 2GB is still to come). As such, you can only fit 1x or 2x GB of the amount of channels on any given card. That's not an Nvidia-created limitation, it's how math works. I guess they could make a 12-channel 3080 Ti, but that would be a _very_ weirdly placed SKU given the pricing and featureset of the 3090 (which is, of course, an extremely silly GPU all on its own).

As for "creative" ... sure, they could make arbitrarily higher VRAM amount versions by putting double density chips on some pad but not others. Would that help anything? Likely not whatsoever.


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## Vayra86 (Sep 21, 2020)

Valantar said:


> ... and here we go again, 'round and 'round we go. This seems to need repeating ad infinitum: _VRAM allocation does not equate to VRAM in use_. Yet VRAM allocation is what monitoring software can see. So unless you are able to test the same game on an otherwise identical GPU with less VRAM and show it actually performing worse, this proves nothing beyond that the game is able to allocate a bunch of data that it might never use. Most game engines will aggressively allocate data to VRAM on the off chance that the data in question might be used - but the vast majority of it isn't.
> 
> Which is why DirectStorage exists, as its _sole purpose_ is to make games quit this stupid behavior through allowing for faster streaming, incentivizing streaming in _what is actually needed_ just before it's needed rather than accounting for every possible eventuality well before it might possibly happen as they do now. Given how important consoles are for game development, DS adoption will be widespread in the near future - well within the useful lifetime of the 3080. And VRAM allocations will as such _shrink _with its usage. Is it possible developers will use this now-free VRAM for higher quality textures and the like? Sure, that might happen, but it will take a lot of time. And it will of course increase the stress on the GPU's ability to process textures rather than its ability to keep them available, moving the bottleneck elsewhere. Also, seeing how Skyrim has already been remastered, if developers patched in DS support to help modders it really wouldn't be that big of a surprise.
> 
> ...



Except Skyrim *stutters *when stuff is loaded into VRAM, I even specifically pointed that out earlier. So when you have less than you need maxed out, the experience immediately suffers. This goes for quite a few games using mods. Its not a streamlined as you might think. And yes, I posed it as a _dilemma. _My crystal ball says something else than yours, and I set the bar a little bit higher when it comes to 'what needs to be done' in due time to keep games playable on GPU XYZ. If current day content can already hit its limits... not a good sign.

Any time games need to resort to swapping and they cannot do that within the space of a single frame update, you will suffer stutter or frametime variance. I've gamed too much to ignore this and I will _never_ get subpar VRAM GPUs again. The 1080 was perfectly balanced that way, always has an odd GB to spare no matter what you throw at it. This 3080, most certainly is not balanced the same way. That is all, and everyone can do with that experience based info whatever they want  I'll happily lose 5 FPS average for a stutter free experience.



Valantar said:


> What? The production node of the chip has zero relation to the amount of VRAM (as long as you're able to fit the necessary amount of channels on the physical die, but that's more down to die size than the node as physical interconnects scale quite poorly with node changes). They didn't "force [themselves] to double" anything - GDDR6X exists in 1GB or 2GB chips (well, 2GB is still to come). As such, you can only fit 1x or 2x GB of the amount of channels on any given card. That's not an Nvidia-created limitation, it's how math works. I guess they could make a 12-channel 3080 Ti, but that would be a _very_ weirdly placed SKU given the pricing and featureset of the 3090 (which is, of course, an extremely silly GPU all on its own).
> 
> As for "creative" ... sure, they could make arbitrarily higher VRAM amount versions by putting double density chips on some pad but not others. Would that help anything? Likely not whatsoever.



Node has everything to do with VRAM setups because it also determines power/performance metrics and those relate directly to the amount of VRAM possible and what power it draws. In addition, the node directly weighs in on the yield/cost/risk/margin balance, as do VRAM chips. Everything is related.

Resorting to alternative technologies like DirectStorage and whatever Nvidia is cooking up itself is all well and good, but that reeks a lot like DirectX12's mGPU to me. We will see it in big budget games when devs have the financials to support it. We won't see it in the not as big games and... well... those actually happen to be the better games these days - hiding behind the mainstream cesspool of instant gratification console/MTX crap. Not as beautifully optimized, but ready to push a high fidelity experience in your face. The likes of Kingdom Come Deliverance, etc.

In the same vein, I don't want to get forced to rely on DLSS for playable FPS. Its all proprietary and per-game basis and when it works, cool, but when it doesn't, I still want to have a fully capable GPU that will destroy everything.



Vya Domus said:


> And here we go again ...
> 
> Allocated VRAM will be used at some point. All of you seem to think that applications  just allocate buffers randomly for no reason at all to fill up the VRAM and then when it gets close to the maximum amount of memory available it all just works out magically such that the memory in use is always less than the one being allocated.
> 
> A buffer isn't allocated now and used an hour later, if an application is allocating a certain quantity of memory then it's going to be used pretty soon. And if the amount that gets allocated comes close to the maximum amount of VRAM available then it's totally realistic to expect problems.



Exactly, I always get the impression I'm discussion practical situations with theorycrafters when it comes to this. There are countless examples of situations that go way beyond the canned review benchmarks and scenes.


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## Vya Domus (Sep 21, 2020)

Valantar said:


> ... and here we go again, 'round and 'round we go. This seems to need repeating ad infinitum: _VRAM allocation does not equate to VRAM in use_.



And here we go again ...

Allocated VRAM will be used at some point. All of you seem to think that applications  just allocate buffers randomly for no reason at all to fill up the VRAM and then when it gets close to the maximum amount of memory available it all just works out magically such that the memory in use is always less than the one being allocated.

A buffer isn't allocated now and used an hour later, if an application is allocating a certain quantity of memory then it's going to be used pretty soon. And if the amount that gets allocated comes close to the maximum amount of VRAM available then it's totally realistic to expect problems.


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## nguyen (Sep 21, 2020)

Oh boy how entitled PC gamers are, demanding that a GPU must be capable of 5 years of usage at Ultra details .
News flash, Ultra details are not meant for current gen hardwares at all, they are there so that people think that their current hardwares suck.

There are always ways to kill the performance of any GPU, regardless of what their capabilites are. Games from 20 years ago, hell let path-traced them and kill every single GPU out there LOL.

Everything has compromise, you just gotta be aware of it and voila, problem gone. 700usd for 3080 10GB is already freaking sweet, 900usd for 3080 20GB ? heck no, even if 4K 120hz become the norm in 2 years (which it won't). That extra money will make better sense when spent on other component of the PC.


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## lexluthermiester (Sep 21, 2020)

Valantar said:


> Your comparison to the 770 is as such a false equivalency


No, that comparison is perfectly valid in the context of the effect of VRAM size differences on a single GPU spec. A similar comparison could be made for the GTS8800 320MB VS 640MB, GTX9800 512MB VS 1GB, GTX560 1GB VS 2GB or the RX580 4GB vs 8GB. The extra ram is very helpful for the then current gen of software and for future software. As the card life-cycle matures the extra RAM becomes critical to the card's continued viability and usefulness. More VRAM generally means a GPU stays useful for longer period of time. This is a well known fact.


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## Vayra86 (Sep 21, 2020)

nguyen said:


> Oh boy how entitled PC gamers are, demanding that a GPU must be capable of 5 years of usage at Ultra details .
> News flash, Ultra details are not meant for current gen hardwares at all, they are there so that people think that their current hardwares suck.
> 
> There are always ways to kill the performance of any GPU, regardless of what their capabilites are. Games from 20 years ago, hell let path-traced them and kill every single GPU out there LOL.
> ...



As long as we're paying arms, legs, kidneys for our GPUs the last few generations I think we can use a bit of entitlement. Otherwise, I fully agree on your post. Its a compromise to be made, for getting your hands on that much core power at 700. I don't like that compromise, some might still like it. That is the personal choice we all have.

I'm glad we arrived at the point where we agree 10GB 3080's are a compromise to begin with.


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## medi01 (Sep 21, 2020)

r9 said:


> What are the expectations price performance for RTX3060?
> 
> Price ~$350
> Perform ~RTX2070


That is where 5700XT is.


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## nguyen (Sep 21, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> As long as we're paying arms, legs, kidneys for our GPUs the last few generations I think we can use a bit of entitlement. Otherwise, I fully agree on your post. Its a compromise to be made, for getting your hands on that much core power at 700. I don't like that compromise, some might still like it. That is the personal choice we all have.
> 
> I'm glad we arrived at the point where we agree 10GB 3080's are a compromise to begin with.



And the 3080 20GB's compromise will be its price, no one here doubted the fact that the more VRAM are better, just that the extra 10 GB will come with too much compromises that it totally negate its benefits.



lexluthermiester said:


> No, that comparison is perfectly valid in the context of the effect of VRAM size differences on a single GPU spec. A similar comparison could be made for the GTS8800 320MB VS 640MB, GTX9800 512MB VS 1GB, GTX560 1GB VS 2GB or the RX580 4GB vs 8GB. The extra ram is very helpful for the then current gen of software and for future software. As the card life-cycle matures the extra RAM becomes critical to the card's continued viability and usefulness. More VRAM generally means a GPU stays useful for longer period of time. This is a well known fact.



My friend still play on an GTX 680 2GB that I sold him, still perfectly capable of DOTA 2 and CSGO at >120fps.
Having an extra 2GB would not make a 770 4GB be able to deliver 60fps at 1080p Ultra in games where the 2GB can't though, so it's moot point.
Having extra VRAM only make sense when you already have the best possible configuration, for example 780 Ti with 6GB VRAM instead of 3GB would make sense (yeah I know the original Titan card).
If you can spend a little more, make it count at the present time, not sometime into the future.

BTW I upgraded to the R9 290 from my old GTX 680, the R9 290 totally destroyed 770 4GB even then though.


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## Vayra86 (Sep 21, 2020)

nguyen said:


> And the 3080 20GB's compromise will be its price, no one here doubted the fact that the more VRAM are better, just that the extra 10 GB will come with too much compromises that it totally negate its benefits.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



We don't know what a 3080 20G is priced at yet. But here you are in the same post contradicting your own thoughts between two responses... I think that underlines the weight of this compromise/dilemma quite fine. The only reason you feel 'stuck' with that 3080 10G is because you're already looking at a 2080ti here. But the actual, truly sound upgrade gen-to-gen would have been some order of a 2070/80(S) or a Pascal card >>> 3070 8G. Much better balance, good perf jump, and yes, you're not on the top end of performance that way... but neither are you with a 3080.

At the same time, a 3090 with 12GB is actually better balanced than the 3080 with 10. If anything it'd make total sense to follow your own advice and double that 3080 to 20GB as it realistically really is the top config. I might be wrong here, but I sense a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance in your specific case? You even provided your own present-day example of software (FS2020) that already surpasses 10GB... you've made your own argument.


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## nguyen (Sep 21, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> We don't know what a 3080 20G is priced at yet. But here you are in the same post contradicting your own thoughts between two responses... I think that underlines the weight of this compromise/dilemma quite fine. The only reason you feel 'stuck' with that 3080 10G is because you're already looking at a 2080ti here. But the actual, truly sound upgrade gen-to-gen would have been some order of a 2070/80(S) or a Pascal card >>> 3070 8G. Much better balance, good perf jump, and yes, you're not on the top end of performance that way... but neither are you with a 3080.
> 
> At the same time, a 3090 with 12GB is actually better balanced than the 3080 with 10. If anything it'd make total sense to follow your own advice and double that 3080 to 20GB as it realistically really is the top config. I might be wrong here, but I sense a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance in your specific case? You even provided your own present-day example of software (FS2020) that already surpasses 10GB... you've made your own argument.



LOL I included 2 pictures of FS 2020 and you only looked at 1, idk who has cognitive dissonance here, did you see the Radeon VII lose against 2070 Super, 2080 and 2080 Super while it does beat 1080 Ti and Titan XP ? VRAM allocation make zero difference there.

All I am saying is doubling down on VRAM with second tier or third tier GPU doesn't make any sense, when you can spend a little more and get the next tier of GPU. 3070 16GB at 600usd, why not just buy the 3080 10GB ? buying 3080 20GB ? yeah just use that extra USD for better RAM where it make a difference in 99% of the time. 

I'm fine with 3090 24GB though, which is the highest performance GPU out there. Its only weakness is the price .


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## medi01 (Sep 21, 2020)

nguyen said:


> you can't distinguish unless zooming 4x into a recording LOL.


I recall I've heard this recently. It was in the context of hyping some upscaling tech.


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## Vayra86 (Sep 21, 2020)

nguyen said:


> LOL I included 2 pictures of FS 2020 and you only looked at 1, idk who has cognitive dissonance here, did you see the Radeon VII lose against 2070 Super, 2080 and 2080 Super while it does beat 1080 Ti and Titan XP ? VRAM allocation make zero difference there.
> 
> All I am saying is doubling down on VRAM with second tier or third tier GPU doesn't make any sense, when you can spend a little more and get the next tier of GPU. 3070 16GB at 600usd, why not just buy the 3080 10GB ? buying 3080 20GB ? yeah just use that extra USD for better RAM where it make a difference in 99% of the time.
> 
> I'm fine with 3090 24GB though, which is the highest performance GPU out there. Its only weakness is the price .



What struck me on the Radeon VII shot is in fact that if you compare AMD to AMD cards, the higher VRAM card performs a whole lot better than the 5700XT that should have about the same core power. In addition, the VII also surpasses the 1080ti where it normally couldn't. I did look at both pics, just from a different angle. I also NEVER said that the higher VRAM card would provide better FPS, in fact I said the opposite: I would gladly sacrifice a few FPS if that means stutter free.

Remember that Turing is also endowed with a much bigger cache.


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## nguyen (Sep 21, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> Remember that Turing is also endowed with a much bigger cache.



And Ampere has 2x the cache size of Turing, and also the next generation of lossless memory compression.
That makes 8GB VRAM of Ampere behave very different from 8GB of Turing, just saying.


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## Vayra86 (Sep 21, 2020)

nguyen said:


> And Ampere has 2x the cache size of Turing



Correct, so that puts an awful lot of weight on cache now. Add RT... The bottleneck is moving. Maybe Nvidia can magic its way out of it. I hope so. But its too early to tell.
Note also that stutter is back with Turing - we've had several updates and games showing us that. Not unusual for a new gen, but still. They need to put work into preventing it. Latency modes are another writing on the wall. We never needed them... 

I'm counting all those little tweaks they do and the list is getting pretty damn long. That's a lot of stuff needing to align for good performance.


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## nguyen (Sep 21, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> Correct, so that puts an awful lot of weight on cache now. Add RT... The bottleneck is moving. Maybe Nvidia can magic its way out of it. I hope so. But its too early to tell.
> Note also that stutter is back with Turing - we've had several updates and games showing us that. Not unusual for a new gen, but still. They need to put work into preventing it. Latency modes are another writing on the wall. We never needed them...
> 
> I'm counting all those little tweaks they do and the list is getting pretty damn long. That's a lot of stuff needing to align for good performance.




No one can tell what the future requirements are, just spend your money where it make noticeable differences in the present time.
If you are bothered with perf/usd then extra VRAM should be your no go zone.
If you aren't bothered with perf/usd then knock yourself out with the 3090 , which I assume the people buying them already have the best CPU/RAM combo, otherwise it's a waste...

Edit: I'm playing on a 2070 Super MaxQ laptop (stuck in mandatory quarantine) with the newest driver, HAGS ON and games are butterly smooth. Which game are you talking about, perhaps I can check.


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## Valantar (Sep 21, 2020)

Vya Domus said:


> And here we go again ...
> 
> Allocated VRAM will be used at some point. All of you seem to think that applications  just allocate buffers randomly for no reason at all to fill up the VRAM and then when it gets close to the maximum amount of memory available it all just works out magically such that the memory in use is always less than the one being allocated.
> 
> A buffer isn't allocated now and used an hour later, if an application is allocating a certain quantity of memory then it's going to be used pretty soon. And if the amount that gets allocated comes close to the maximum amount of VRAM available then it's totally realistic to expect problems.


What? No. That is not true whatsoever. Games allocate data for many possible future game states, of which only a handful can come true. If a player in a game is in a specific position, looking in a specific direction, then the game streams in data to account for the possible future movements of that player within the relevant pre-loading time window, which is determined by expected transfer speed. They could, for example, turn around rapidly while not moving otherwise, or run forwards, backwards, strafe, or turn around and run in any direction for whatever distance is allowed by movement speed in the game, but they wouldn't suddenly warp to the opposite end of the map or inside of a building far away. If the player is standing next to a building or large object that takes several seconds to move around, what is behind said object doesn't need to be loaded until the possibility of it being seen arises. Depending on level design etc., this can produce wildly varying levels of pre-caching (an open world requires a lot more than a game with small spaces), but the rule of thumb is to tune the engine to pre-load anything that might reasonably happen. I.e. if you're next to a wall, texture data for the room on the other side isn't pre-loaded, but they will be if you are right next to a door.

As time passes and events happen (player movement, etc.), unused data is ejected from memory to allow for pre-caching of the new possibilities afforded by the new situation. If not, then pretty much the entire game would need to live in VRAM. Which of course repeats for as long as the game is running. Some data might be kept and not cleared out as it might still be relevant for a possible future use, but most of it is ejected. The more possible scenarios that are pre-loaded, the less of this data is actually used for anything. Which means that the slower the expected read rate of the storage medium used, the lower the degree of utilization becomes as slower read rates necessitate earlier pre-caching, expanding the range of possible events that need to be accounted for.

Some of this data will of course be needed later, but at that point it will long since have been ejected from memory and pre-loaded once again. Going by Microsoft's data (which is to be very accurate, they do after all make DirectX, so they should have the means to accurately monitor this), DirectStorage improves the degree of utilization of data in VRAM by 2.5x. Assuming they achieved a 100% utilization rate (which they obviously didn't, as that would require their caching/streaming algorithms to be effectively prescient), that means _at the very best_ their data showed a 40% rate of utilization before DirectStorage - i.e. current DirectX games are _at most_ making use of 40% of the data they are pre-loading before clearing it out. If MS achieved a more realistic rate of utilization - say 80% - that means the games they started from utilized just 32% of pre-loaded data before clearing it out. There will always be _some_ overhead, so going by this data alone it's entirely safe to say based on this information that current games cache _a lot_ more data than they use.

And no, this obviously isn't happening on timescales anywhere near an hour - we're talking millisecond time spans here. Pre-caching is done for perhaps the next few seconds, with data ejection rolling continuously as the game state changes - likely frame-by-frame. That's why moving to SSD storage as the default for games is an important step in improving this - the slow seek times and data rates of HDDs necessitate multi-second pre-caching, while adopting even a SATA SSD as the baseline would dramatically reduce the need for pre-caching.

And that is the point here: DS and SSD storage as a baseline will allow for less pre-caching, shortening the future time span for which the game needs possibly necessary data in VRAM, thus significantly reducing VRAM usage. You obviously can't tell _which_ of the pre-loaded data is unnecessary until some other data has been used (if you could, there would be no need to pre-load it!). The needed data might thus just as well live in that ~1GB exceeding a theoretical 8GB VRAM pool for that Skyrim screenshot as in the 8GB that are actually there. But this is exactly why faster transfer rates help alleviate this, as you would then need less time to stream in the necessary data. If a player is in an in-game room moving towards a door four seconds away, with a three-second pre-caching window, data for what is beyond the door will need to start streaming in in one second. If faster storage and DirectStorage (though the latter isn't strictly necessary for this) allows the developers to expect the same amount of data to be streamed in in, say, 1/6th of the time - which is reasonable even for a SATA SSD given HDD seek times and transfer speeds - that would mean data streaming doesn't start until 2.5s later. For that time span, VRAM usage is thus reduced by as much as whatever amount of data was needed for the scene beyond the door. And ejection can also be done more aggressively for the same reason, as once the player has gone through the door the time needed to re-load that area is similarly reduced. Thus, the faster data can be loaded, the less VRAM is needed at the same level of graphical quality.


lexluthermiester said:


> No, that comparison is perfectly valid in the context of the effect of VRAM size differences on a single GPU spec. A similar comparison could be made for the GTS8800 320MB VS 640MB, GTX9800 512MB VS 1GB, GTX560 1GB VS 2GB or the RX580 4GB vs 8GB. The extra ram is very helpful for the then current gen of software and for future software. As the card life-cycle matures the extra RAM becomes critical to the card's continued viability and usefulness. More VRAM generally means a GPU stays useful for longer period of time. This is a well known fact.


That is only true if the base amount of VRAM becomes an insurmountable obstacle which cannot be circumvented by lowering settings. Which is why this is applicable to something like a 2GB GPU, but won't be in the next decade for a 10GB one. The RX 580 is an excellent example, as the scenarios in which the 4GB cards are limited are nearly all scenarios in which the 8GB one also fails to deliver sufficient performance, necessitating lower settings no matter what. This is of course exacerbated by reviewers always testing at Ultra settings, which typically increase VRAM usage noticeably without necessarily producing a matching increase in visual quality. If the 4GB one produces 20 stuttery/spiky frames per second due to a VRAM limitation but the 8GB one produces 40, the best thing to do (in any game where frame rate is really important) would be to lower settings on both - in which case they are likely to perform near identically, as VRAM use drops as you lower IQ settings.


Vayra86 said:


> Except Skyrim *stutters *when stuff is loaded into VRAM, I even specifically pointed that out earlier. So when you have less than you need maxed out, the experience immediately suffers. This goes for quite a few games using mods. Its not a streamlined as you might think. And yes, I posed it as a _dilemma. _My crystal ball says something else than yours, and I set the bar a little bit higher when it comes to 'what needs to be done' in due time to keep games playable on GPU XYZ. If current day content can already hit its limits... not a good sign.
> 
> Any time games need to resort to swapping and they cannot do that within the space of a single frame update, you will suffer stutter or frametime variance. I've gamed too much to ignore this and I will _never_ get subpar VRAM GPUs again. The 1080 was perfectly balanced that way, always has an odd GB to spare no matter what you throw at it. This 3080, most certainly is not balanced the same way. That is all, and everyone can do with that experience based info whatever they want  I'll happily lose 5 FPS average for a stutter free experience.


Do the stutters kick in immediately once you exceed the size of the framebuffer? Or are you comparing something like an 8GB GPU to an 11GB GPU at settings allocating 9-10GB for those results? If the latter, then that might just as well be indicative of a poor pre-caching system (which is definitely not unlikely in an old and heavily modded game).


Vayra86 said:


> Node has everything to do with VRAM setups because it also determines power/performance metrics and those relate directly to the amount of VRAM possible and what power it draws. In addition, the node directly weighs in on the yield/cost/risk/margin balance, as do VRAM chips. Everything is related.


Yes, everything is _related_, but you presented that as a _causal _relation, which it largely isn't, as there are multiple steps in between the two which can change the outcome of the relation.


Vayra86 said:


> Resorting to alternative technologies like DirectStorage and whatever Nvidia is cooking up itself is all well and good, but that reeks a lot like DirectX12's mGPU to me. We will see it in big budget games when devs have the financials to support it. We won't see it in the not as big games and... well... those actually happen to be the better games these days - hiding behind the mainstream cesspool of instant gratification console/MTX crap. Not as beautifully optimized, but ready to push a high fidelity experience in your face. The likes of Kingdom Come Deliverance, etc.


From what's been presented, DS is not going to be a complicated API to implement - after all, it's just a system for accelerating streaming and decompression of data compressed with certain algorithms. It will always take time for new tech to trickle down to developers with less resources, but the possible gains from this makes it a far more likely candidate for adoption than somethinglike DX12 mGPU - after all, reducing VRAM utilization can directly lead to less performance tuning of the game, lowering the workload on developers.

This tech sounds like a classic example of "work smart, not hard", where the classic approach has been a wildly inefficient brute-force scheme but this tech finally seeks to actually load data into VRAM in a _smart_ way that minimizes overhead.


Vayra86 said:


> In the same vein, I don't want to get forced to rely on DLSS for playable FPS. Its all proprietary and per-game basis and when it works, cool, but when it doesn't, I still want to have a fully capable GPU that will destroy everything.


I entirely agree on that, but it's hardly comparable. DLSS is proprietary and only works on hardware from one vendor on one platform, and needs significant effort for implementation. DS is cross-platform and vendor-agnostic (and is likely similar enough in how it works to the PS5's system that learning both won't be too much work). Of course a system not supporting it will perform worse and need to fall back to "dumb" pre-caching, but that's where the baseline established by consoles will serve to raise the baseline featureset over the next few years.


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## efikkan (Sep 21, 2020)

Valantar said:


> That isn't really the question though - the question is whether the amount of VRAM will become a noticeable bottleneck in cases where shader performance isn't. And that, even though this card is obviously a beast, is quite unlikely. Compute requirements typically increase faster than VRAM requirements (if for no other reason that the amount of VRAM on common GPUs increases very slowly, forcing developers to keep VRAM usage somewhat reasonable), so this GPU is far more likely to be bottlenecked by its core and architecture rather than having "only" 10GB of VRAM. So you'll be forced to lower settings for reasons other than running out of VRAM in most situations.


With so many in here loving to discuss specs, it's strange that they can't spot the obvious;
With RTX 3080's 760 GB/s bandwidth, if you target 144 FPS, that leaves 5.28 GB of bandwidth per frame if you utilize it 100% perfectly. Considering most games use multiple render passes, they will read the same resources multiple times and will read temporary data back again, I seriously doubt a game will use more than ~2 GB of unique texture and mesh data in a frame, so why would RTX 3080 need 20 GB of VRAM then?

As you were saying, computational and bandwidth requirements grow with VRAM usage, often they grow even faster too.



Vayra86 said:


> Any time games need to resort to swapping and they cannot do that within the space of a single frame update, you will suffer stutter or frametime variance.


Any time data needs to be swapped from system memory etc., there will be a penalty, there no doubt about that. It's a latency issue, no amount of bandwidth for PCIe or SSDs will solve this. So you're right so far.

Games have basically two ways of managing resources;
- No active management - everything is allocated during loading (still fairly common). The driver may swap if needed.
- Resource streaming



Vayra86 said:


> The 1080 was perfectly balanced that way, always has an odd GB to spare no matter what you throw at it. This 3080, most certainly is not balanced the same way.


This is where I have a problem with your reasoning, where is the evidence of this GPU being unbalanced?
3080 is two generations newer than 1080, it has 2 GB more VRAM, more advanced compression, more cache and a more advanced design which may utilize the VRAM more efficiently. Where is your technical argument for this being _less balanced_?
I'll say the truth is in benchmarking, not in anecdotes about how much VRAM "feels right".


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## Vya Domus (Sep 21, 2020)

Valantar said:


> What? No. That is not true whatsoever. Games allocate data for many possible future game states, of which only a handful can come true. If a player in a game is in a specific position, looking in a specific direction, then the game streams in data to account for the possible future movements of that player within the relevant pre-loading time window, which is determined by expected transfer speed. They could, for example, turn around rapidly while not moving otherwise, or run forwards, backwards, strafe, or turn around and run in any direction for whatever distance is allowed by movement speed in the game, but they wouldn't suddenly warp to the opposite end of the map or inside of a building far away. If the player is standing next to a building or large object that takes several seconds to move around, what is behind said object doesn't need to be loaded until the possibility of it being seen arises. Depending on level design etc., this can produce wildly varying levels of pre-caching (an open world requires a lot more than a game with small spaces), but the rule of thumb is to tune the engine to pre-load anything that might reasonably happen. I.e. if you're next to a wall, texture data for the room on the other side isn't pre-loaded, but they will be if you are right next to a door.



None of this even remotely makes sense but I learnt my lesson not to argue with you because you're never going to admit that, so I wont.

All data has to be there, it doesn't matter that you are rendering only a portion of a scene, all assets that need to be in that scene must be already in memory. They are never loaded based on the possibility of something happening or whatever.


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## InVasMani (Sep 21, 2020)

Lowering texture quality... 



No thank you with your 640kb VRAM is all you'll ever need...


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## Valantar (Sep 21, 2020)

Vya Domus said:


> None of this even remotely makes sense but I learnt my lesson not to argue with you because you're never going to admit that, so I wont.
> 
> All data has to be there, it doesn't matter that you are rendering only a portion of a scene, all assets that need to be in that scene must be already in memory. They are never loaded based on the possibility of something happening or whatever.


So asset streaming doesn't exist? Either you are posting this through a time machine (if so: please share!) or you need to update your thinking.


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## londiste (Sep 21, 2020)

Mods are a very bad example. These commonly use data or methods that would not fly at all in any real game but get a pass "because it is just a mod".


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## BoboOOZ (Sep 21, 2020)

phill said:


> Whatever happened to just giving the different levelled tiers of GPUs normal amounts of VRAM... 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32GB etc..  I don't get it why we need 10GB or 20GB....


It's because, depending on the size of GDDR chips available at a given moment, only certain combinations of bandwidth/size are available.

In this case, 12GB would've been great for the 3080, but potentially the bandwidth would've been the same as the 3090, which would have not created enough segmentation.

Thus they had to chose 10GB, which can already be limiting in some present games (e.g. battlefield 5 4Kmax with RT on), with the option of launching a different tier later on, if they feel the card is not competitive enough.



Minus Infinity said:


> Big Navi not even released and they are panicking already. Would have thought this would be part of the mid-life update. Anyway 10Gb or 20GB you won't be getting one soon.


Nvidia doesn't panic, but they plan ahead and take competition very seriously. That's why they win so often, even sometimes when they don't have the best performance or the best price-performance ratio. They rarely leave theùselves open and that's how any well-organized company should be.


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## Valantar (Sep 21, 2020)

BoboOOZ said:


> Nvidia doesn't panic, but they plan ahead and take competition very seriously. That's why they win so often, even sometimes when they don't have the best performance or the best price-performance ratio. They rarely leave theùselves open and that's how any well-organized company should be.


Well, the launch of the Super SKUs in the last generation kind of contradicts that - that was a pure reaction to AMD and clearly not one that was planned out to any significant degree beforehand. Had it been, they wouldn't have made such a mess of their lineup (some Supers replacing older SKUs, others coexisting with them, etc.) while torpedoing the value of their previous SKUs. Holding a dominant market position carries a certain momentum with it, which is far more likely the reason for Nvidia's continued success in the (relatively few) situations where they have been notably behind. Most customers are poorly informed and not quite rational, so brand recognition and customer trust (especially when coupled with huge marketing budgets) go quite far even when the competition has a superior product.


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## BoboOOZ (Sep 21, 2020)

Valantar said:


> Well, the launch of the Super SKUs in the last generation kind of contradicts that - that was a pure reaction to AMD and clearly not one that was planned out to any significant degree beforehand. Had it been, they wouldn't have made such a mess of their lineup (some Supers replacing older SKUs, others coexisting with them, etc.) while torpedoing the value of their previous SKUs. Holding a dominant market position carries a certain momentum with it, which is far more likely the reason for Nvidia's continued success in the (relatively few) situations where they have been notably behind. Most customers are poorly informed and not quite rational, so brand recognition and customer trust (especially when coupled with huge marketing budgets) go quite far even when the competition has a superior product.


I'm sure that you agree with me that they had planned these new higher VRAM SKU exactly so that they don't need to have another short notice reaction this time.
And for the last time, there was no way to launch new SKUs without hurting the sales of the older ones, it's natural. As soon as the 3080 20GB comes out, the 10GB version will be much less desirable, that's how it goes.
And the fact their lineup was confusing, it may have been part of their strategy, or maybe they don't think it is important. Just look at their mobile lineup. There was no pressure from AMD there, and it's still all over the place with supers and max-q SKU where you have no idea to expect in terms of performance if you haven't watched 10 comparative reviews.


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## londiste (Sep 21, 2020)

BoboOOZ said:


> In this case, 12GB would've been great for the 3080, but potentially the bandwidth would've been the same as the 3090, which would have not created enough segmentation.


12GB vs 10GB would probably not be a big enough difference to matter in this context. Especially when the rumored competition has 16GB.


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## EarthDog (Sep 21, 2020)

Valantar said:


> Well, the launch of the Super SKUs in the last generation kind of contradicts that - that was a pure reaction to AMD and clearly not one that was planned out to any significant degree beforehand. Had it been, they wouldn't have made such a mess of their lineup (some Supers replacing older SKUs, others coexisting with them, etc.) while torpedoing the value of their previous SKUs.


Sorry, I disagree here. I follow the logic, but sometimes it isnt that easy...

Both Navi and (some) Super cards were launched in July 2019, right? If this was a response, shouldn't it be after Navi release? How are the super cards neutered...by software or laser? You cant enable more bits, so they seem laser cut. While rumors are abound, if this was a response and not something planned, I find it difficult to believe they can software or laser cut to neuter the dies and get them out that fast. It wasn't like they didn't know AMD would be coming out with something. They didn't read a rumor on wccftech and suddenly start looking for ways to get a more competitive product out there.

So yes, the timing was likely in response, sure, but to think these were not planned beforehand feels a bit myopic to me. I'd bet my life Super cards would have come out regardless of AMD. 

Did I miss something?


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## BoboOOZ (Sep 21, 2020)

londiste said:


> 12GB vs 10GB would probably not be a big enough difference to matter in this context. Especially when the rumored competition has 16GB.


12GB would have been enough that they could have turned RT on in Battlefield 5 in the Digital Foundry comparison.
Frankly, I think that this leak (the fact that they are preparing a 20GB version)  hurts their image much more than the fact that the competition has 16GB. 12GB would've been enough for 4 years at 4k.



EarthDog said:


> While rumors are abound, if this was a response and not something planned, I find it difficult to believe they can software or laser cut to neuter the dies and get them out that fast. It wasn't like they didn't know AMD would be coming out with something.


Well, it's almost impossible to get solid proof of this, but from what I have heard from people in the industry, they are an extremely agile company, capable of taking a decision in a matter of days and implementing it in a matter of weeks. For the Supers, they managed to get info about the performance and the pricing of the 5700XT, and I would argue that their response, albeit rushed, was much less botched than that of AMD, who had to apply a last-minute overclock on the card and drop its price, which lead to problems with the card being too hot, loud and power-hungry.
That is probably why AMD had finally learned their lesson and there are almost no leaks coming out this time.


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## EarthDog (Sep 21, 2020)

Oh yes, they do seem a bit more agile, but I highly doubt they had hard information in time to respond with the Supers. The supers were easily a twinkle in their eye long before AMD released Navi. I do imagine Navi sped up the release time frame for these cards, a response if you will, but these don't come out in weeks.


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## medi01 (Sep 21, 2020)

BoboOOZ said:


> For the Supers, they managed to get info about the performance and the pricing of the 5700XT, and I would argue that their response, albeit rushed, was much less botched than that of AMD, who had to apply a last-minute overclock on the card and drop its price, which lead to problems with the card being too hot, loud and power-hungry.



Lolwhat, 5700XT is power hungry?


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## BoboOOZ (Sep 21, 2020)

medi01 said:


> Lolwhat, 5700XT is power hungry?


Well, not anymore  .

Loudness and temperatures are much more disturbing, only next summer will start users complaining about their 3080's, since all cooling solutions seem to be good quality.


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## medi01 (Sep 21, 2020)

BoboOOZ said:


> Well, not anymore  .


Nor in the past.
AMD has forced NV to respond with supers.
5700 series still sold beautifully despite being rather pricey by AMD's standards.


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## Valantar (Sep 21, 2020)

BoboOOZ said:


> I'm sure that you agree with me that they had planned these new higher VRAM SKU exactly so that they don't need to have another short notice reaction this time.
> And for the last time, there was no way to launch new SKUs without hurting the sales of the older ones, it's natural. As soon as the 3080 20GB comes out, the 10GB version will be much less desirable, that's how it goes.
> And the fact their lineup was confusing, it may have been part of their strategy, or maybe they don't think it is important. Just look at their mobile lineup. There was no pressure from AMD there, and it's still all over the place with supers and max-q SKU where you have no idea to expect in terms of performance if you haven't watched 10 comparative reviews.


I don't doubt they had higher VRAM SKUs planned all along (it's way too soon for those to be showing up now if it was a late addition), but they've likely been kept "secret" as Nvidia don't want to hurt sales of their current and upcoming cards - availability of 2GB GDDR6X chips isn't expected until 2021, after all. It's still pretty weird though, as they're leaving themselves with the choice of either cluttering up the lineup like last time, and thus pissing people off, or having higher VRAM SKUs replace the initial ones, pissing off early buyers. Either way it'll be a weird mess.


EarthDog said:


> Sorry, I disagree here. I follow the logic, but sometimes it isnt that easy...
> 
> Both Navi and (some) Super cards were launched in July 2019, right? If this was a response, shouldn't it be after Navi release? How are the super cards neutered...by software or laser? You cant enable more bits, so they seem laser cut. While rumors are abound, if this was a response and not something planned, I find it difficult to believe they can software or laser cut to neuter the dies and get them out that fast. It wasn't like they didn't know AMD would be coming out with something. They didn't read a rumor on wccftech and suddenly start looking for ways to get a more competitive product out there.
> 
> So yes, the timing was likely in response, sure, but to think these were not planned beforehand feels a bit myopic to me. I'd bet my life Super cards would have come out regardless of AMD.


That depends entirely how you define "response". Your definition here seems to be a literalist one, i.e. that to be a response it must arrive after and have been thought out after the arrival of what it responds to. IMO that ignores the timescales and predictability of the GPU market, where it is entirely possible to... what should we call it, "preemptively respond"(?) to something. Nvidia clearly knew AMD had new GPUs coming, and that they were going to be competitive in their market segments. They also clearly had planned how to deliver such a response, and did so early in the hopes of showing themselves as having initiative and not simply being reactive. However the positioning, performance and featuresets of the GPUs in question contradict this, as it is obvious that the Super lineup was in no way planned from the launch of Turing - if that was the case, they wouldn't have ended up with the confusing mess of a lineup they did (2060, 2060S, 2070, 2070S, 2080, 2080S, 2080 Ti), with confusion about which SKUs were discontinued and which weren't, etc. My impression is that Nvidia wanted to demonstratively preempt AMD's launch while also seeing an opportunity to sell lower binned (partially disabled) dice that they previously had no use for, letting them allocate fully enabled chips entirely to higher margin enterprise products. This also speaks to the possibility of there being worse yields of Turing than initially planned, as a pure price cut would otherwise have made more sense, though there's also an argument here that Nvidia didn't want to establish a precedent for a $499 RTX xx80 series. Either way, even if Nvidia was early it was clearly a response from their side. Was it planned months before? Obviously. Was it part of their roadmap for Turing all along? I highly doubt that. So was it a response to AMD becoming more competitive in these market segments, even if AMD's GPUs weren't out yet? Absolutely.


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## EarthDog (Sep 21, 2020)

Valantar said:


> That depends entirely how you define "response". Your definition here seems to be a literalist one, i.e. that to be a response it must arrive after and have been thought out after the arrival of what it responds to. IMO that ignores the timescales and predictability of the GPU market, where it is entirely possible to... what should we call it, "preemptively respond"(?) to something. Nvidia clearly knew AMD had new GPUs coming, and that they were going to be competitive in their market segments. They also clearly had planned how to deliver such a response, and did so early in the hopes of showing themselves as having initiative and not simply being reactive. However the positioning, performance and featuresets of the GPUs in question contradict this, as it is obvious that the Super lineup was in no way planned from the launch of Turing - if that was the case, they wouldn't have ended up with the confusing mess of a lineup they did (2060, 2060S, 2070, 2070S, 2080, 2080S, 2080 Ti), with confusion about which SKUs were discontinued and which weren't, etc. My impression is that Nvidia wanted to demonstratively preempt AMD's launch while also seeing an opportunity to sell lower binned (partially disabled) dice that they previously had no use for, letting them allocate fully enabled chips entirely to higher margin enterprise products. This also speaks to the possibility of there being worse yields of Turing than initially planned, as a pure price cut would otherwise have made more sense, though there's also an argument here that Nvidia didn't want to establish a precedent for a $499 RTX xx80 series. Either way, even if Nvidia was early it was clearly a response from their side. Was it planned months before? Obviously. Was it part of their roadmap for Turing all along? I highly doubt that. So was it a response to AMD becoming more competitive in these market segments, even if AMD's GPUs weren't out yet? Absolutely.


You're basing your opinion on a lot of assumptions. I don't have the time to go into a diatribe about the whole thing, but I can tell you these were more than a twinkle in their eye. IDGAH(oot) about naming conventions.... correlation is not causation. Again, they just can't go, 'oh shit, AMD results', and then suddenly respond and get a product to market WITH the new AMD cards...regardless of bins/full chips, etc etc.

Nvidia came out with cards and price points that fit the market at the time. Knowing AMD would respond eventually, surely they had something being cooked up.


Valantar said:


> Was it planned months before? Obviously. Was it part of their roadmap for Turing all along? I highly doubt that.


Doubt it all you want... video cards aren't pulled out of assess (just Jensen's oven... ). The Supers were all a part of things, surely.

We'll agree to disagree and move forward.


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## BoboOOZ (Sep 21, 2020)

Valantar said:


> My impression is that Nvidia wanted to demonstratively preempt AMD's launch while also seeing an opportunity to sell lower binned (partially disabled) dice that they previously had no use for, letting them allocate fully enabled chips entirely to higher margin enterprise products. This also speaks to the possibility of there being worse yields of Turing than initially planned, as a pure price cut would otherwise have made more sense, though there's also an argument here that Nvidia didn't want to establish a precedent for a $499 RTX xx80 series.


My opinion is that Nvidia tries to avoid straight price cuts, they either try to offer better performance at the same price, or when doing a price cut, they justify it by removing some functionality to keep face (like for the 2060 KO). That's definitely good marketing.


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## EarthDog (Sep 21, 2020)

BoboOOZ said:


> My opinion is that Nvidia tries to avoid straight price cuts, they either try to offer better performance at the same price, or when doing a price cut, they justify it by removing some functionality to keep face (like for the 2060 KO). That's definitely good marketing.


The 2060 KO wasn't an Nvidia product IIRC, it was Evga(?).


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## Valantar (Sep 21, 2020)

EarthDog said:


> You're basing your opinion on a lot of assumptions. I don't have the time to go into a diatribe about the whole thing, but I can tell you these were more than a twinkle in their eye. IDGAH(oot) about naming conventions.... correlation is not causation. Again, they just can't go, 'oh shit, AMD results', and then suddenly respond and get a product to market WITH the new AMD cards.
> 
> Nvidia came out with cards and price points that fit the market. Knowing AMD would respond eventually, surely they had something being cooked up.
> Doubt it all you want... video cards aren't pulled out of assess (just Jensen's oven... ). The Supers were all a part of things, surely.
> ...


But I didn't say that. I explicitly said that they were planned, but planned as a response. AMD had been singing Navi's praises long before it arrived, and Nvidia obviously has as well placed sources within the industry as anyone else. So as I said, I think they saw an opportunity to shuffle their product stack, replace expensive fully enabled SKUs with cheaper cut-down ones, while responding to AMD on price and by not seeming to have stagnated. Do I believe Nvidia would have made a mid-cycle Turing refresh without Navi looming? They probably would have, but I sincerely doubt it would have looked anything like the Super lineup we came to know - Nvidia's preferred way of doing these things is to add higher priced, higher performance tiers, not cut prices outright. When was the last time Nvidia explicitly cut the price of anything?

Edit: nice ninja edit btw


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## EarthDog (Sep 21, 2020)

Valantar said:


> But I didn't say that. I explicitly said that they were planned, but planned as a response. AMD had been singing Navi's praises long before it arrived, and Nvidia obviously has as well placed sources within the industry as anyone else. So as I said, I think they saw an opportunity to shuffle their product stack, replace expensive fully enabled SKUs with cheaper cut-down ones, while responding to AMD on price and by not seeming to have stagnated. Do I believe Nvidia would have made a mid-cycle Turing refresh without Navi looming? They probably would have, but I sincerely doubt it would have looked anything like the Super lineup we came to know - Nvidia's preferred way of doing these things is to add higher priced, higher performance tiers, not cut prices outright. When was the last time Nvidia explicitly cut the price of anything?
> 
> Edit: nice ninja edit btw


Yes, you said 'planned to any significant degree'. I disagree with that assertion...simple. I can't buy the assumptions you're selling and we're talking in grey areas, so we'll agree to disagree and move forward. 

RE: The ninja edit... what's your point? It changed nothing.


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## BoboOOZ (Sep 21, 2020)

EarthDog said:


> The 2060 KO wasn't an Nvidia product IIRC, it was Evga(?).


It's a collaboration, the chip on the 2060 KO is a special chip provided by Nvidia. It's a cut-down version of a larger die but maintains some hardware from the larger die, such that the performance in encoding is better than non-KO 2060s.
So basically, although it's got more performance, it's offered at a lower price, and it was launched around the launch of the 5600XT and managed to steal the thunder of the AMD card and many reviewers recommend the KO.
So no, this is not an EVGA move, it's just another brilliant marketing move from Nvidia, made in collaboration with a trusted partner.


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## EarthDog (Sep 21, 2020)

BoboOOZ said:


> It's a collaboration, the chip on the 2060 KO is a special chip provided by Nvidia. It's a cut-down version of a larger die but maintains some hardware from the larger die, such that the performance in encoding is better than non-KO 2060s.
> So basically, although it's got more performance, it's offered at a lower price, and it was launched around the launch of the 5600XT and managed to steal the thunder of the AMD card and many reviewers recommend the KO.
> So no, this is not an EVGA move, it's just another brilliant marketing move from Nvidia, made in collaboration with a trusted partner.


Sorry, yes... they of course had to work with Nvidia on it. Question though... do any other board partners have the KO silicon (I don't know)?


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## BoboOOZ (Sep 21, 2020)

EarthDog said:


> Sorry, yes... they of course had to work with Nvidia on it. Question though... do any other board partners have the KO silicon (I don't know)?


It's exclusive to Evga, indeed.


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## Valantar (Sep 21, 2020)

EarthDog said:


> Yes, you said 'planned to any significant degree'. I disagree with that assertion...simple. I can't buy the assumptions you're selling and we're talking in grey areas, so we'll agree to disagree and move forward.
> 
> RE: The ninja edit... what's your point? It changed nothing.


Yes, that seems to be the most productive approach at this point. My point about the ninja edit was that I saw that piece of writing for the first time quoted in my own response after posting it, which kind of undermined the message of your edit  Just made me chuckle, that's all.


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## R0H1T (Sep 21, 2020)

BoboOOZ said:


> *My opinion is that Nvidia tries to avoid straight price cuts*, they either try to offer better performance at the same price, or when doing a price cut, they justify it by removing some functionality to keep face (like for the 2060 KO). *That's definitely good marketing.*


Nope that's Intel 101 & part of the reason why I more often than not dislike Nvidia, much like Intel or indeed Apple. Planned *obsolescence* !


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## BoboOOZ (Sep 21, 2020)

R0H1T said:


> Nope that's Intel 101 & part of the reason why I more often than not dislike Nvidia, much like Intel or indeed Apple. Planned *obsolescence* !


I understand where you're coming from, but a large company cannot succeed only with good engineers. Good leadership, marketing, sales, and lawyers are all required for success, such are the rules of the market. Engineering is only one part of the equation.
And for alleged immoral or anti-consumer practices, the companies that you are talking about are doing very well, which means they are doing what they should be doing. It's AMD who has to improve. You either adapt to the market, or you disappear.


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## Valantar (Sep 21, 2020)

BoboOOZ said:


> I understand where you're coming from, but a large company cannot succeed only with good engineers. Good leadership, marketing, sales, and lawyers are all required for success, such are the rules of the market. Engineering is only one part of the equation.
> And for alleged immoral or anti-consumer practices, the companies that you are talking about are doing very well, which means they are doing what they should be doing. It's AMD who has to improve. You either adapt to the market, or you disappear.


... that's a downright shockingly naive stance. "They are doing well, which means they are doing what they should be doing" - so anticompetitive practices are "what you should be doing" as long as you get away with it? The only thing that matters is that the company is successful, no matter how they come about this success? Yeah, you really ought to rethink that statement with a bit more context taken into account.


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## BoboOOZ (Sep 21, 2020)

Valantar said:


> ... that's a downright shockingly naive stance. "They are doing well, which means they are doing what they should be doing" - so anticompetitive practices are "what you should be doing" as long as you get away with it? The only thing that matters is that the company is successful, no matter how they come about this success? Yeah, you really ought to rethink that statement with a bit more context taken into account.


Naive? I'd call it realistic, maybe cynical, but certainly not naive. It's simply an amoral, evolutionary perspective. People vote with their wallets, and it's very obvious lots of people vote with Apple, Intel, and Nvidia, in spite of their anticompetitive past history.
I'm not saying I agree with it and I certainly vote with my wallet as my conscience points me, but that doesn't change reality, most people are not that disciplined, knowledgeable, or they simply do not care about these issues.
The only things that really stop companies from behaving very badly are existing laws and market acceptance. Even existing laws are not a hard line, because in many cases it is more profitable for these companies to break the rules and drag it out in court, instead of simply obeying them. Both Nvidia and Intel did this in the past (I don't know much about Apple) and it allowed them to stomp certain of their competitors. This is the reality and understanding is not naive, quite the contrary.


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## Vayra86 (Sep 21, 2020)

efikkan said:


> Any time data needs to be swapped from system memory etc., there will be a penalty, there no doubt about that. It's a latency issue, no amount of bandwidth for PCIe or SSDs will solve this. So you're right so far.
> 
> Games have basically two ways of managing resources;
> - No active management - everything is allocated during loading (still fairly common). The driver may swap if needed.
> ...



If you revisit GPUs from different time frames with new games, you can spot where some of those fall off faster than others. Sometimes that is even up to the memory wiring, such as with the 970, which lost more frames than it should have for 4GB GPU. It just drowns earlier; and in a similar way, how the 7970 held its own for so long with 3GB and hefty bandwidth. Maybe I'm wrong, and yes, its about gut feeling more than anything. Because really thats all we have looking forward in time. GPU history is not without design and balancing failures, we all know this.

In the end, success or failure of advances in GPUs will be down to how devs (get to) utilize it. Whether or not they understand it and whether or not its workable. I'm seeing the weight move from tried and trusted VRAM capacity to different areas. Not all devs are going to keep up. In that sense its sort of a good sign that Nvidias system for Ampere is trying to mimick next gen console features, but still. This is going to be maintenance intensive for sure.

I'll shut up about it now, I've had enough attention for my thoughts on the subject


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## lexluthermiester (Sep 22, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> I'll shut up about it now, I've had enough attention for my thoughts on the subject


Right there with you. This thread has turned into the same tired set of arguments from years past...


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## Raendor (Sep 22, 2020)

Dudebro-420 said:


> Yeah that's what the article said.



Hey "genious", you realize the article could be updated because it didn't say it first?


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## efikkan (Sep 22, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> Maybe I'm wrong, and yes, its about gut feeling more than anything. Because really thats all we have looking forward in time. GPU history is not without design and balancing failures, we all know this.


Remember that RTX 3060/3070/3080 will be Nvidia's most important models for the next two years or so. Nvidia also have a very good idea of the upcoming top games, since they have access to many of them during development. There is no one in the world more capable of predicting what should be needed in the next few years than them, but that doesn't make them immune to stupid business decisions of course.



Vayra86 said:


> In the end, success or failure of advances in GPUs will be down to how devs (get to) utilize it. Whether or not they understand it and whether or not its workable. I'm seeing the weight move from tried and trusted VRAM capacity to different areas. Not all devs are going to keep up. In that sense its sort of a good sign that Nvidias system for Ampere is trying to mimick next gen console features, but still. This is going to be maintenance intensive for sure.


This simply comes down to the fact that there are very few moves by the developers which would increase the VRAM utilization without also increasing bandwidth requirements and computational requirements just as much. If you increase model/texture details, the others go up too. Increasing frame rate increases the others but not the capacity needs. Basically the main thing that could increase VRAM requirements disproportionate to other things is having more resources statically allocated and not doing any kind of resource streaming, or someone comes up with a very different rendering technique.


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## lexluthermiester (Sep 22, 2020)

efikkan said:


> If you increase model/texture details, the others go up too.


Not always and even when it does happen, it's not always symmetrical.


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## medi01 (Sep 22, 2020)

Doom is the example of "textures do not fit".
2080 performance is drastically affected, when increasing texture quality so that it doesn't fit into 8GB (but fits into 3080's 10GB, thus making it look better)


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## londiste (Sep 22, 2020)

medi01 said:


> Doom is the example of "textures do not fit".
> 2080 performance is drastically affected, when increasing texture quality so that it doesn't fit into 8GB (but fits into 3080's 10GB, thus making it look better)


I bet in addition to that Doom is an example of Vulkan memory management peculiarities


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## lexluthermiester (Sep 22, 2020)

medi01 said:


> Doom is the example of "textures do not fit".
> 2080 performance is drastically affected, when increasing texture quality so that it doesn't fit into 8GB (but fits into 3080's 10GB, thus making it look better)


And there are a great many other games that fit in to that category of feature classification.



londiste said:


> I bet in addition to that Doom is an example of Vulkan memory management peculiarities


Not really.


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## John Naylor (Oct 6, 2020)

BArms said:


> Maybe they should launch the original 3080 first? I really don't consider meeting less than 1% of the demand a real launch.



Nvidia was unable to meet demand for the 2080Ti right up to the 3080 launch and is by no means an unusual thing  ... part of this is the normal production line ramp iup issues, but most of it is the opportunists looking to resell



btarunr said:


> The logical next step to DirectStorage and RTX-IO is graphics cards with resident non-volatile storage (i.e. SSDs on the card). I think there have already been some professional cards with onboard storage (though not leveraging tech like DirectStorage). You install optimized games directly onto this resident storage, and the GPU has its own downstream PCIe root complex that deals with it



See the Play Crysis on 3090 srticle








						Crysis 3 Installed On and Run Directly from RTX 3090 24 GB GDDR6X VRAM
					

Let's skip ahead of any "Can it run Crysis" introductions for this news piece, and instead state it as it is: Crysis 3 can absolutely run when installed directly on a graphics card's memory subsystem. In this case, an RTX 3090 and its gargantuan 24 GB of GDDR6X memory where the playground for...




					www.techpowerup.com
				






nikoya said:


> they should release the 3080 20gb ASAP



I'd wait till we see the performance comparisons ....not what MSI Afterburner or anything else says is being used allocated .... I wanna see how fps is impacted.  So far with 6xx, 7xx, 9xxx, there's been little  observable impacts between cards with different RAM amounts when performance was above 30 fps .  We have seen an effect w/ poor console ports and see illogical effects where the % difference was larger at 1080 than 1440.... which makes no sense.  But every comparison I have read has not been able to show a significant fps impact.

In instances where a card comes in a X RAM version and a 2X RAM version, we have seen various utilies say that VRAM between 1X abd 2X is being used allocated, but we have not seen a significant  difference in fps when fps > 30 .  We have even seen games refuse to install with the X RAM, but after intsalling the game with the 2X RAm card, it plays at the same fps wiyth no impact on the user experience when you switch out to the X RAM version afterwards.

GTX 770 4GB vs 2GB Showdown - Page 3 of 4 - AlienBabelTech



Valantar said:


> Why on earth would a 60-tier GPU in 2020 need 16GB of VRAM? Even 8GB is _plenty_ for the types of games and settings that GPU will be capable of handling for its useful lifetime. Shader and RT performance will become a bottleneck at that tier long before 8GB of VRAM does. This is no 1060 3GB.



The 1060 3GB was purposely gimped with 11% less shaders because, otherwise, it showed no impact with half the VRAM.   VRAM usage increases with resolution, so the 6% fps advangage that the 6GB card with 11% more shders had should have widened significantly at 1440p.  It did not thereby proving that it was of no consequence.  of the 2 games that had more significant impacts, on one of those two, the performance was closer between the 3 GB and 6 GB cards that at 1080 .... clearly this definace of logic points to the fact that other factors were at play in this instance.  The 1060 was a 1080p card ... if 3 GB was inadequate at 1080p, then it should hev been a complete washout at 1440p and it wasn't ....



			https://tpucdn.com/review/msi-gtx-1060-gaming-x-3-gb/images/perfrel_1920_1080.png
		



			https://tpucdn.com/review/msi-gtx-1060-gaming-x-3-gb/images/perfrel_2560_1440.png
		




ppn said:


> 3060 6GB 3840 cuda.
> 3060 8GB 4864 cuda
> 
> there you have it, 8GB version is 30% faster,



They have to cut the GPU down, otherwise it will be obvious that the VRAM has no impact on fps when within the playable range.



nguyen said:


> At 4K FS2020 will try to eat as much VRAM as possible (>11GB) but that doesn't translate to real performance.



RAM Allocation is much different than RAM usage

Video Card Performance: 2GB vs 4GB Memory - Puget Custom Computers
GTX 770 4GB vs 2GB Showdown - Page 3 of 4 - AlienBabelTech 
Is 4GB of VRAM enough? AMD’s Fury X faces off with Nvidia’s GTX 980 Ti, Titan X | ExtremeTech

From 2nd link
"There is one last thing to note with _Max Payne 3_:  It would not normally allow one to set 4xAA at 5760×1080 with any 2GB card as it claims to require 2750MB.  However, when we replaced the 4GB GTX 770 with the 2GB version, the game allowed the setting.  And there were no slowdowns, stuttering, nor any performance differences that we could find between the two GTX 770s.  "


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