I would have agreed if this card is on the level of 2080 or Radeon VII; but we are talking about a card 30-40% faster than 2080Ti, and I believe we kind of expect 3080 to work well for 4k gaming.
While it is true that the bottleneck due to computational speed will come at some point, with even less VRAM than 2080Ti, I have to be worried about the VRAM becoming a bottleneck faster than processor in this situation.
GPU memory isn't directly managed by the games, and each generation have improved memory management and compression. Nvidia and AMD also manages memory differently, so you can't just rely on specs. Benchmarks will tell if there are any bottlenecks or not.
With every generation for the past 10+ years people have raised concerns about Nvidia's GPUs having too little memory, yet time after time they've shown to do just fine. Never forget that both Nvidia and AMD have close collaboration with game developers, they have a good idea of where the game engines will be in a couple of years.
i think at this point its still early to tell how much vram games would be going to use, future games will be developed with PS5 and series x architecture in mind, games may use more vram than we are used to. Were still not sure how efficient nvidia's new tensore core assisted memory compression for now, or how RTX IO would perform on future games.
With the consoles having 16 GB of total memory, split between OS, the software on the CPU and the GPU, it's highly unlikely that those games will delegate more than 10 GB of that for graphics.
If anything, this should mean that few games will use more than ~8GB of VRAM for the foreseeable future with these kinds of detail levels.
Memory compression is independent of Tensor cores, & Turing was IIRC the last time they improved upon it. Tensor cores don't help memory compression & Ampere hasn't improved upon that aspect of Turing.
Memory compression has improved with every recent architecture from Nvidia up until now. There are rumors of "tensor compression", but I haven't looked into that yet.
You forget with Nvcache and tensor compression (~20% compression) this card is effectively 12GB, so I wouldn’t worry too much
Compression certainly helps, but it doesn't work quite that way.
Memory compression in GPUs is lossless compression transparent to the user. As with any kind of data, the compressions rate of lossless compression is tied to information density. While the memory compression has become more sophisticated with every generation, it's still limited to compress mostly "empty" data.
Render buffers with mostly sparse data is compressed very well, while textures are generally only compressed in "empty" sections. Depending on the game, the compression rate can vary a lot. Especially games with many render passes can see some substantial gains, sometimes over 50% I believe, while others are <10%. So please don't think of memory compression as something that expands memory by xx %.
