Because 10GB would either require A) an asymmetric VRAM setup which people will lose their shat over, or B) a re-designed GPU with a wider memory bus, which would mean you have two different GPUs with the same name, which people will lose their shat over.
So just double the VRAM, which people will ALSO lose their shat over, but will be the cheapest to implement.
Yep
The main issue was that Nvidia had to use overpriced memory (GDDR6X) since their GPU needed all that bandwidth to perform. Since it was pricey, the amount of memory on Nvidia GPU stayed stable for few years and people got used to it. The other issue is memory size and bus size.
Memory chips are 32 bit. So you take your bus size, your memory chip size and you get your total ram.
What could help is non binary chip size. 3 GB chips could give 12 GB to the 4060.
Now Most GPU could use more memory and they would just run fine. VRAM is like RAM. You want to have always enough and it's better to have enough free space than being thigh.
GPU can always swap data in and out, but that use precious time and bandwidth that you could use on something else. And even with high main system memory bandwidth and PCI-E 4.0 16x bandwidth, it still take time to load what you need. This is why you have stutter when you lack of ram.
In the past, VRAM was mostly used to store Frame buffer (rendered frames waiting to be displayed) and textures. And this was the main reason why someone would say you need X amount of memory to run X resolution. At that time, the frame buffer was using a significant portion of the VRAM
Today, it must store way more. Almost Every shader you run will generate some data that will need to be reused at some point. Also, now most game will use various buffer to exchange things with CPU and there is also the need to keep data from previous frames for all the temporal effects. That is one of the reason why memory requirement between resolution are much closer than their actual pixel counts.
GPU get more powerful as they compute more stuff. That stuff need to be stored somewhere. I wouldn't buy the 8 GB variant. i find that the 6 GB 3060 was already too low on memory. The 4060 might cost more, but will last way longer.
Nvidia's lineup doesn't make any sense.
