10GB vram enough for the 3080? Discuss..

[Yaayuh!]

https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-provides-further-details-on-geforce-rtx-30-series

The writing is on the wall, new consoles have > 10GB VRAM, which means console ports will use much more than this on the un-optimised PC (un-optimised compared to consoles at least). Games at 4k (4k is mainstream this year thanks to consoles and these next gen cards) already use more than 10GB of VRAM.

When the GTX 980 released with 4GB GDDR5 (6GB for the 980Ti) the PS4 had been released with 8GB GDDR5. It went okay I think.

The new XBox has 16GB but split 10GB + 6GB, the 6GB intended likely for less intensive functions in system.

 

[queamin]

That tells you how much VRAM those games will use, if it's available, rather than how much they need. Two completely different things.

Yeah you know if you hit the limit of your Vram as you get stutters and frame rate drops that will happen, look at 580 4GB and 8GB a few years ago and as you push up the res and sliders the gap between them get bigger and bigger.

 

[CuriousTomCat]

Who wants to buy a 3080 to use textures that are lower quality than a consoles?

The assumption i am making here is that the new generation of consoles will be pushing higher quality textures due to the increase in VRAM they have over the previous generation.

Consoles have 16Gb shared memory total. That's VRAM and Memory combined.

Even if a console did use 11Gb, that would only leave 5Gb system memory to load the game and to run Windows. Try playing a game with 5gb ram lol.

Consoles will have to stick to 8Gb VRam max to leave 8Gb for memory.

 

[opethdisciple]

When the GTX 980 released with 4GB GDDR5 (6GB for the 980Ti) the PS4 had been released with 8GB GDDR5. It went okay I think.

The new XBox has 16GB but split 10GB + 6GB, the 6GB intended likely for less intensive functions in system.

That's interesting... so theoretically the Xbox also has 10GB of vram.

I expect Devs will target this vram as the upper limit in games. I mean what's to gain from going over it as most peoples rigs wont have more then 10GB of vram anyway.

 

[dogma77]

it is a no buy for me, I will wait for next version with more vram

 

[Lithium]

It helps once you run out of VRAM but can not make up for a significant deficit in VRAM.

Of course it does because you can use preemptive strategies to be much more efficient with your utilisation of the available VRAM. The faster you can fill a cache the less total cache you need to keep things running smoothly. Gone are the days of developers having a 50MB/sec disk budget, they've now got potentially 24GB/sec budget. Ergo, less VRAM is required.

 

[Troezar]

Can remember when the argument was if 2gb was enough.

I can also remember at the time that 2gb even at high resolution like 1440p or 1600p was enough and the graphics actually looked quite good. 8 years later 8gb really is not enough but the graphics have improved very little, what is going on?

Reminds me of the Rare developers I spoke to who laughed at PC developers filling CD's with sloppy code when they were getting results on a tiny cartridge on the N64. Could be the same issue?

 

[Shante]

I'm still buying it

 

[CuriousTomCat]

Can remember when the argument was if 2gb was enough.

I can also remember at the time that 2gb even at high resolution like 1440p or 1600p was enough and the graphics actually looked quite good. 8 years later 8gb really is not enough but the graphics have improved very little, what is going on?

3D engines primary use triangles to draw surfaces. Increased detail requires an increased triangle count, which in turn requires faster hardware to render.

The more detail there is, the less perceivable future improvements will be. It would be like adding more pixels to a high quality photo and trying to notice a difference. It would still require a faster pc, even though you can see any improvement.

Graphics in games are very close to real life now, as far as the eye can tell. But to actually reach that level would require hardware many times faster than what we have today, even though visually, it looks very close.

 

[Chuk_Chuk]

Consoles have 16Gb shared memory total. That's VRAM and Memory combined.

Even if a console did use 11Gb, that would only leave 5Gb system memory to load the game and to run Windows. Try playing a game with 5gb ram lol.

Consoles will have to stick to 8Gb VRam max to leave 8Gb for memory.

The PS4 and Xonex have been working with less for the past couple of years. Going by your logic we don't need more than 4GB of VRAM since on the current gen of consoles would have allocated 4GB to Vram and 4GB to RAM.
Do you think 4GB of VRAM is enough for current gen games?

Animation and certain physics data will be used by both the GPU and CPU (This data would be stored on both the VRAM and system RAM on PC).
That leaves things like gameplay code, AI code and sound that will be exclusively used by the CPU to be stored in RAM. I don't expect the CPU exclusive data that I've just listed to be equal in size to graphical data.

Of course it does because you can use preemptive strategies to be much more efficient with your utilisation of the available VRAM. The faster you can fill a cache the less total cache you need to keep things running smoothly. Gone are the days of developers having a 50MB/sec disk budget, they've now got potentially 24GB/sec budget. Ergo, less VRAM is required.

On PC there budget is the maximum speed of a SATA 3 SSD. Unless they want to make NVME drives mandatory. Lets see if they do. Can't wait for all the ads for gamer grade NVME drives.

No it doesn't Everything you've listed helps but will not make up for a significant deficit in VRAM. If it did the consoles would have just stuck with 8GB of RAM.

 

[Yaayuh!]

That's interesting... so theoretically the Xbox also has 10GB of vram.

Depends how exactly they're allocating data in memory, but yes, that's what it looks like.

 

[Lithium]

On PC there budget is the maximum speed of a SATA 3 SSD. Unless they want to make NVME drives mandatory. Lets see if they do. Can't wait for all the ads for gamer grade NVME drives.
No it doesn't Everything you've listed helps but will not make up for a significant deficit in VRAM. If it did the consoles would have just stuck with 8GB of RAM.

"No it doesn't" is not an argument, neither is the strategy of consoles even relevant as a comparison because their hardware refresh cycles are twice as long long.
NVME drives are mandatory for RTX IO so yes you'll need that to take advantage. Just like you'll need a decent processor and ram to feed your GPU so it's nothing new. If you still have a SATA3 SSD then you can't take advantage of the new storage API and you'll just have to deal with 10GB of relatively static VRAM. (which btw is fine for the majority of games even at 4K)

It's absolutely true that the faster you can load a cache the less important your cache size becomes. It's one of the key parameters when determining your cache architecture. Not only do cache misses have much less impact, you can use more advanced preemptive cache strategies to ensure you always have the information available.

Right now the cache strategy for games is "load as much as you can into VRAM during the loading screen because a cache miss has heavy performance hit and decompressing textures on the fly is slow and causes a big CPU hit", with high speed IO your cache strategy is "load as much as you can into VRAM and if we don't have enough space then look-ahead and decide what the game needs in the next 5 seconds because we've got a 24GB streaming budget and very little CPU overhead"

 

[Dave2150]

When the GTX 980 released with 4GB GDDR5 (6GB for the 980Ti) the PS4 had been released with 8GB GDDR5. It went okay I think.

The new XBox has 16GB but split 10GB + 6GB, the 6GB intended likely for less intensive functions in system.

The PS5 doesn't have that limitation, and can use far more than 10GB of VRAM.

Each to his own, personally I'm already seeing > 10GB in use in the games I play at 4k, so I wouldn't wanna spend £650 on a 10GB card in 2020.

3080 needs 16GB, though probably can only have 20GB due to the memory bus/dram package size limitation. That's what the 3080 should be, not a paltry 10GB.

 

[FrozenShivers]

They will not develop games that need 16GB of vram for PC when they know that 90% of people only have 8-10GB on their cards.

90% of people most likely have under 8GB of vram. We are not the average PC gamer.

 

[Trustdesa]

Imho in my opinion it is not, however I was looking at some benchmark and it seems it is rare to get over 10gb but....new consoles as said above can push more vram and we know we get consoles ports in most cases, so not sure why they didn't go for two version of 3080 even though surely will do in a few month time killing prices of 3080s to flood second hand market, that's how they get market share...consumers pay the price for it.

This time they are fairly priced but for anyone after a 3070 I'd wait if AMD releases a similar card with more VRAM, 8GB is really really ridiculous it can be as fast as you want there is always a certain amount of texture loaded anyway... 3070 imho have not much value, better to go with a 2080ti second hand eventually...

I am unsure about 3080 too only due of VRAM, way way too little for future use, although also as said 8gb is more average nowadays and that will limit PC Games vs Consoles as anyone with less than 8gb has in fact an ancient system looking at the next 2-3 years...

Video below, some are quite open world however RDR2 has pretty much average texturing so not really surprised it does not go too high on usage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hivbU8xjG0A

The PS5 doesn't have that limitation, and can use far more than 10GB of VRAM.

Each to his own, personally I'm already seeing > 10GB in use in the games I play at 4k, so I wouldn't wanna spend £650 on a 10GB card in 2020.

3080 needs 16GB, though probably can only have 20GB due to the memory bus/dram package size limitation. That's what the 3080 should be, not a paltry 10GB.

True but I saw some Radeon VII Vram usage few minutes ago and it seems it uses more than Nvidia, not sure if that is the case as it wasn't the point of my research but... may be also a driver issue.

They've been deliberately thrifty with the vram so they can sell more cards in two years time if you ask me.

It won't be two years, within the end of next you'll see a "super-like" cycle of card with the actual Vram you would have expected to see to start with, at least this time they aren't robbing consumer as with 20xx.

Lol "midrange" here we go... It's not midrange. It's the second top card (thinking 3080Ti being top). 3090 is a titan and therefore is not a "consumer" card. an 80 class card is and always has been a high end card. not top. but high end.

Did/does the 10GB annoy me? Yup, do I wish it was more? yup. Would I pay more for more? yup.
However, I am gaming at 1440P. and I keep telling myself... it's a £650 card which really is not bad. Im happy enough to buy.

Agree but most likely they will ask you to pay more in 1 year time with the 3080 SUPER with 16GB VRAM (or 20) for same price as you bought your 3080 so they will sell your same card twice.

Surely calling a 3080 MID RANGE when Nvidia BOSS HIMSELF said is the new ti? Always puzzled by these comments....people give opinion on who technically has last word on something (his creator).

Another thing, from the video above I see only Horizon Zero Dawn using 10. something GB of VRAM, however I read that (not sure as I do not get that technical) Vram shown is always what the game/engine request the GPU to allocate not necessarily what the GPU then uses... one may have to tweak the settings if using 4K WITHOUT DLSS if.

We don't know until we see benchmarks anyway and Nvidia won't allow any to be shown until a day before or after release...

 

[opethdisciple]

The issue here is, we all assume we know what we are talking about and have been been part of the development process with Nvidia and partaking in the discussions between Nvidia / Microsoft and game devs. I assure you 99.999999999999999999% of us have not been privy to these discussions and do not know a scobie do about how this will work on the next gen games.

We are also probably thinking about this in terms of the old generation of games. The next gen games will be pulling in more data from nvme so perhaps this is why 10GB is OK for a high end gaming card for the next gen.

Remember this.... if games do start coming out needing more than 10GB of vram and the new AMD cards have 12-20GB on a card then sales will start going towards AMD and Nvidia would not be putting themselves in this position.

So I am fairly sure I trust them that 10GB will be enough.

 

[Simon Belmont]

it is a no buy for me, I will wait for next version with more vram

This^

Better to be future proof

Also better shroud. This new series shrouds look nasty.

 

[ghutchison14078]

Nah, I'll be hanging back for the 3080 Ti or Super version with hopefully 16/20GB Vram.

 

[Kelt]

Nah, I'll be hanging back for the 3080 Ti or Super version with hopefully 16/20GB Vram.

I think I'm inclined to agree with you.

 

[opethdisciple]

For me anyway, a 3080 with more vram will be more than £650 which is kind of getting ridiculously expensive so I might not be in the market for one anyway.