Is 6 GB VRAM enough?

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surya13

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Jan 22, 2014
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Hi everyone

I have a GTX 1060 with 6 GB VRAM. When I bought it, I thought 6 GB was more than enough. But I see Rise of the Tomb Rider gobbling up more than 5.5 GB of VRAM.

So my question is "Is 6 GB VRAM enough for gaming?"

BTW I play games at 1080p with settings maxed out with FXAA.
 
Solution
geofelt
By and large, the vram included in a graphics card will be appropriate to that card.

VRAM has become a marketing issue.
My understanding is that vram is more of a performance issue than a functional issue.
A game needs to have most of the data in vram that it uses most of the time.
Somewhat like real ram.
If a game needs something not in vram, it needs to get it across the pcie boundary
hopefully from real ram and hopefully not from a hard drive.
It is not informative to know to what level the available vram is filled.
Possibly much of what is there is not needed.
What is not known is the rate of vram exchange.
Vram is managed by the Graphics card driver, and by the game. There may be differences in effectiveness between amd and...
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Barty1884

Barty1884

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Apr 16, 2015
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The question is a little tough to answer definitively. My best attempt at a response would be "for most people, and most titles, yes".

ROTTR and DOOM at maxed out settings are utilizing >5GBVRAM in a lot of cases.

That's not necessarily a true reflection of the 'gaming' landscape overall.


It's a bit of a catch 22. For 1080p, 6GB should be more than enough..... for most people. From a nVidia standpoint, for more VRAM you've got to look at 1070/1080/1080TI/TitanXp .............. which, generally speaking, would be wasted performance at 1080p, but VRAM!
 
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geofelt

geofelt

Titan
Oct 9, 2006
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By and large, the vram included in a graphics card will be appropriate to that card.

VRAM has become a marketing issue.
My understanding is that vram is more of a performance issue than a functional issue.
A game needs to have most of the data in vram that it uses most of the time.
Somewhat like real ram.
If a game needs something not in vram, it needs to get it across the pcie boundary
hopefully from real ram and hopefully not from a hard drive.
It is not informative to know to what level the available vram is filled.
Possibly much of what is there is not needed.
What is not known is the rate of vram exchange.
Vram is managed by the Graphics card driver, and by the game. There may be differences in effectiveness between amd and nvidia cards.
And differences between games.
Here is an older performance test comparing 2gb with 4gb vram.
http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Video-Card-Performance-2GB-vs-4GB-Memory-154/
Spoiler... not a significant difference.
A more current set of tests shows the same results:
http://www.techspot.com/review/1114-vram-comparison-test/page5.html

And... no game maker wants to limit their market by
requiring huge amounts of vram. The vram you see will be appropriate to the particular card.
 
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Solution
Solandri

Solandri

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Jan 4, 2012
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VRAM is mostly used to hold textures (so you don't have to read them off disk or transfer them from main memory). Framebuffers take very little VRAM. A 1920x1080 framebuffer (24-bit color depth) takes 6 MB. A 4k framebuffer would be 24 MB. 4x MSAA of a 4k image would require only a 96 MB framebuffer. MSAA is the big honking overkill version of anti-aliasing. Other anti-aliasing algorithms like FXAA use sub-sampling, so don't require a larger framebuffer, only an extra one.

Textures on the other hand can rapidly eat up VRAM. A high texture is typically 1024x1024, and includes smaller copies at 512x512, 256x256, 128x128, and sometimes smaller yet for use on distant objects. So a 32-bit (24-bit color + 8-bit transparency) high texture would eat up about 8 MB of VRAM. If you figure the game requires 100 textures be loaded simultaneously, that's 800 MB of VRAM. Moving up to ultra textures (2048*2048) nearly quadruples this to 32 MB per texture, 3.1 GB for 100 textures.

So basically if you're running out of VRAM, all you have to do is reduce the texture quality one notch. If you're playing at 1080p, you don't really need ultra textures except for large environmental models. A 2048x2048 clothing texture is useless since the clothing isn't going to cover enough pixels on your screen to let you distinguish it from a 1024x1024 clothing texture. But a 2048x2048 wall texture would appear better than 1024x1024 if you ran right up to it so the entire screen were filled with a quarter of the texture.
 
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