VRAM Usage

While testing the RTX 3080 12 GB, I was wondering how much of a difference 12 GB VRAM really makes, and how much VRAM games use today. That's why I ran our whole test suite of 25 games at three resolutions and recorded the peak VRAM usage. Technically, this reports the VRAM allocation—how much memory in the GPU is filled with some data. It doesn't mean that all of this data is used for every frame, every second, or ever.



To guide the eye, the dotted green line shows the VRAM size of the RTX 3080 10 GB. The vast majority of games aren't even getting close to that. The only titles that reach 10 GB at 4K are Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing enabled, Deathloop, and Far Cry 6 with ray tracing enabled. Of course, there might be very specific situations and maps where other games can reach 10 GB, too—I am happy to hear about your experiences in the comments.