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
For RE4
Techpowerup's 1080p Ultra RT
6800 XT = 105.8 fps
3070 = 88
Techspot's 1080p "Max" with RT
6800 = 91 fps
3070 = crashed
Techpowerup's 1440p Ultra RT
6800 XT = 85 fps
3070 = crashed
Techspot's 1440p "Max" with RT
6800 =77 fps
3070 = crashed
Techpowerup used a faster RX 6800 XT model while Techspot used a lesser RX 6800 model. Techspot's RX 6800 vs Techpowerup's RX 6800 XT numbers are close.
My recommendation is if you are buying a new card in 2023 and play at resolutions higher then 1080p, get a card with 12gb - 16gb card with VRAM. For 99% of games on the market, 12gb is enough. Game manufactures dont want high system requirements for games because fewer people will be able to buy and play their games.
There will always be some poorly optimized console ports that will run poorly and use unreasonable system resources. And there will always be a game or two that pushes the envelop and we ask "Can it run Crysis?"
Also FG goes along with Reflex to compensate for latency, and also you don't use FG to hit 60fps, but you use it to hit 100+ fps and the latency in this situation is very good. I was skeptical at first but after I tried FG on several games and I can say it is a game changer and every demanding game need to have it.
This 16% better RT includes games that barely use RT, however in games that heavily use RT and have meaningful visual impact the RT cores on the7900XTX get overwhelmed, that is why the 4080 is 25-45% faster in heavily RT use.
Plus some of the game engines out there cache the whole VRAM, even if you have 24 or 32GB.
We not talking frames per second, we talking about texture quality, textures going *poof* and games crashing. Also some games stutter due to excessive asset swapping (caused by low VRAM).
Now days many games have dynamic engines which adjust to available VRAM on the fly so the effect of low VRAM is not as abvious as it could be.
Some of us are not ok with PS2/PS3 quality textures in 2023.
Its not important to you personally, thats fine, doesnt mean its BS though.
How does this one manage 20GB on a 160bit bus then?
Logically if the 384 bus was for 24Go, 256 should be for 16.
No dice on Navi 31, still 128 and unless they double the RAM for certain models, it's still going to be an 8.
For example, here is a photo of the Asus Strix 3090.
In my opinion, there is only one way to make the 4070 with 16GB using dual chip placement, which is to use 4 memory controllers. But in this case, the memory bus will be 128-bit, which will negatively impact the performance.
www.pcworld.com/article/415858/nvidia-agrees-to-geforce-gtx-970-false-advertising-settlement-offers-30-refunds.html
So we won't be seeing anything like that this time.
But knowing Nvidia if they released a 16 gig model it would cost an extra $300.
I said I was using ultra settings on that game, INCLUDING textures, and didn't have any crashes or stuttering, or sudden pop up effects or buffering on that game.
I miss the days of load everything into ram, and only then you play, no live loading of stuff in background. I wonder what prevents them doing that now? hmm.
I think what the developers/engines do right now is pretty well thought: set a baseline and if they find more VRAM than that, try to load some more. Preloading is guesswork though, because you never know what the next area the player visits will be. Or, you can try to predict the next area based on which "exit" the player approaches, but the player changes their mind, you're just preloading things that won;t be used next and you initiate IO that may lead to other performance drops.