Wednesday, April 12th 2023
AMD Plays the VRAM Card Against NVIDIA
In a blog post, AMD has pulled the VRAM card against NVIDIA, telling potential graphics card buyers that they should consider AMD over NVIDIA, because current and future games will require more VRAM, especially at higher resolution. There's no secret that there has been something of a consensus from at least some of the PC gaming crowd that NVIDIA is being too stingy when it comes to VRAM on its graphics cards and AMD is clearly trying to cash in on that sentiment with its latest blog post. AMD is showing the VRAM usage in games such as Resident Evil 4—with and without ray tracing at that—The Last of US Part I and Hogwarts Legacy, all games that use over 11 GB of VRAM or more.
AMD does have a point here, but as the company has as yet to launch anything below the Radeon RX 7900 XT in the 7000-series, AMD is mostly comparing its 6000-series of cards with NVIDIA's 3000-series of cards, most of which are getting hard to purchase and potentially less interesting for those looking to upgrade their system. That said, AMD also compares its two 7000-series cards to the NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti and the RTX 4080, claiming up to a 27 percent lead over NVIDIA in performance. Based on TPU's own tests of some of these games, albeit most likely using different test scenarios, the figures provided by AMD don't seem to reflect real world performance. It's also surprising to see AMD claims its RX 7900 XTX beats NVIDIA's RTX 4080 in ray tracing performance in Resident Evil 4 by 23 percent, where our own tests shows NVIDIA in front by a small margin. Make what you want of this, but one thing is fairly certain and that is that future games will require more VRAM, but most likely the need for a powerful GPU isn't going to go away.
Source:
AMD
AMD does have a point here, but as the company has as yet to launch anything below the Radeon RX 7900 XT in the 7000-series, AMD is mostly comparing its 6000-series of cards with NVIDIA's 3000-series of cards, most of which are getting hard to purchase and potentially less interesting for those looking to upgrade their system. That said, AMD also compares its two 7000-series cards to the NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti and the RTX 4080, claiming up to a 27 percent lead over NVIDIA in performance. Based on TPU's own tests of some of these games, albeit most likely using different test scenarios, the figures provided by AMD don't seem to reflect real world performance. It's also surprising to see AMD claims its RX 7900 XTX beats NVIDIA's RTX 4080 in ray tracing performance in Resident Evil 4 by 23 percent, where our own tests shows NVIDIA in front by a small margin. Make what you want of this, but one thing is fairly certain and that is that future games will require more VRAM, but most likely the need for a powerful GPU isn't going to go away.
218 Comments on AMD Plays the VRAM Card Against NVIDIA
must say that resident evil 4 with rt enabled result caught me by surprise...
Consoles have been defining the baseline resource needs for decades now, the writing was always on the wall. That 4070ti you got there is going to run into trouble sooner rather than later.Yep... that alone proves the point either way, Fury X fell off much faster than the 6GB 980ti while they were about equal on launch.
Now the tables are turned.
Its pretty ironic to see crappy VRAM caps on cards by the same company pushing RT which requires additional VRAM over non RT, don't you think.
The higher we move in tiers, the more green lines we see at the bottom. Also in the 7900XT vs 4070Ti the Perf/$ comparison is missing. I wonder why.
AMD does have a point here, and Hardware Unboxed did offered us a good reason to avoid models that are VRAM limited even today.
The only fools that don't seem to want to get that are the ones who bought into low VRAM GPUs at a premium. Sucks to be them. They've been warned a million times. But going by their own cognitive dissonance, they don't care, so all is well in the world isn't it? They're not skipping games from devs that push over 12GB requirements either, so who's really losing here?
I'm just sittin here enjoying my popcorn right now.
A few months ago people were still selling 2nd hand 3080 10GBs at (way) over 700 EUR over here. Try that now. Lmao. Ampere and also most of Ada are going to go down as the least future proof gens in a long long time. Now you know why Ampere's stack is a full blown mess of too low initial and far too high VRAM capacities in the rebound. Nvidia knew it, and they're still pushing for planned obscolescence, and people are still in denial.
Nvidia has been pushing planned obsolescence on cards with only 8GB of VRAM since the RTX 20 series, newer games are only going to continue to use more VRAM.
Youre touting high end gpu superiority, gotta enable RT always.
3070 and 3070Ti are great examples of so badly aging cards with 8GB if VRAM. The same will happen in 2 years with 4070 and 4070Ti. Nvidia knows this and tries to force customers to upgrade sooner rather than later.
As always, in order to maximize profits for shareholders, companies are often being anti-consumer.
So you can't say that it doesn't have a huge relevance.
The 3070 Ti is an especially bad offender in this area. I wonder how it compares to the much cheaper 6700XT 12GB in the lower 1% and 0.1% of these latest 2023 AAA games, or even how it compares to the RTX 3060 12GB.
One of the things DS can do is decompression from memory. Compressed game assets can be stored in system RAM, then transfered to VRAM and decompressed with fast algorithms on the GPU on the fly. Ideally this could reduce the need for more VRAM but it takes additional effort to optimise for the PC platform.
textures disappearing and games looking like shit because of it on 8GB cards.
with dram prices collapsing like now there is no reason for nvidia to not make the 4070 a 16gb card