I'll only be playing in 1440p.. so I hope that 10gb will be enough for the next 3/4 years... as much as I'd like to get a 3080 20gb, I think it'll cost significantly more than the 10gb version and I wouldn't be willing to pay more than £700 for a GPU.
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10GB vram enough for the 3080? Discuss..
- Thread starter Perfect_Chaos
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Soldato
Yeah. I had learned the lesson years earlier too ! Not on the Fury X, on the GTX 470. OCUK had a load of cheap cards (Point Of View, IIRC) and I snagged a brand new 470 for £160. Which was less than half of what it launched at about two weeks earlier. God bless OCUK.
Any way, I slapped a Zalman V3000F on it (the green one, Zotac used it on their Amp! cards way back when) and I was super happy. It clocked like a beast and was a great card. And then one day Battlefield 3 came out. Maybe about a year into owning the card? at that time I had no idea about the importance of VRAM and nor how much I was even using. I simply didn't care. So I am getting right into BF3. Loving it, like. I got to the stage where you are in the shopping mall with the sniper rifle. Terrorists rush in and you have to take them out quickly before they get up the stairs and kill the bloke you are trying to keep alive. However, it used to pause and stutter and basically I could not even complete the level. I tried turning settings down but it still did the same thing.
So to try and find out what was going on I used that search engine people use and typed in "Battlefield 3 stuttering badly". I was then directed to an Nvidia page where they explained "texture streaming" and what it was and what it did. Basically when your card does not have enough VRAM it loads stuff into your paging file (textures, maps etc) and then basically "streams" the textures into the GPU. Kinda like you would stream a movie over the network or what not. Only in practice it is absolutely appalling. Your FPS drops by about 90%.
The fix? I went and bought one of the cheapo 6970 Lightning rejects OCUK had for £160 and I flew through that level like poop through an old lady with IBS.
Now this has changed slightly over the years. Instead of doing that with your paging file (even a SSD didn't help, BTW, because I was running a Corsair X32 at the time !) it does it with your physical RAM. However, as we all know physical RAM is waaaaaay slower than VRAM.
Now these are old cases of this, and you would think it has been fixed now right? it hasn't.
Two years ago when the 20 series launched the 2080 and Ti were labelled as 4k cards. And they were in fairness. However, this test was done what? two weeks ago? and already the 2080 does not have enough VRAM.
Note how until up to that point the 2080 was seriously kicking the 1080Ti's ass. However, once the VRAM cap was reached and it started reaching to the memory for textures? the performance falls off a cliff.
So why does this happen? it's Nvidia's way of keeping you coming back for more. It's a great way to artificially retire a card long before it should.
Ampere had to be many things, and "a decent price" was one of them. Mostly because Nvidia don't have the arena to themselves this time around, and have basically every single combatant in the arena. Both of the new consoles are coming *and* big Navi. So they had to find a way to get a card out there that looks cheap. That's your 10gb 3080.
If you buy a new GPU every round? you might just get away with it. However, given that a dev cycle into production takes around two years? well let's go back to that 2080 that has already run short of VRAM.
Don't underestimate it mate is what I am saying. If you see your GPU as a long term investment and don't replace it every time something new launches? then either wait for the 20gb (which yeah is overkill but too much is always enough !) or see what AMD bring to the table.
Right now Nvidia can't even use the fastest of the new GDDR6X because it would push the TGP too high. However, once they can get Ampere to behave just a little bit better (which should come in time) they will no doubt use that faster VRAM making even faster cards.
Soldato
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It'd have to be a paper launch though as they can't even match demand for the 10gb versions never mind 20 currently. They probably think it'll be enough for people to hold off buying the AMD though and much as I hate to say it they'd probably be right
Soldato
But the GDDR6X memory is much faster so presumably can swap in and out the data. Also once this RTX IO/Direct Storage thing gets implemented perhaps that will help as well.
I do see how 10GB is probably the minimum amount of VRAM they could have put on the card, but the next gen consoles will not have access to a full 16GB for VRAM. The OS and the game will use some of this just to power the box and run the game.
So perhaps if we give the console the benefit of the doubt perhaps it will have 12GB of VRAM available to it to play with for games.
And do we really think the consoles OS + game ram only uses up 4GB...?
Games these days on the PC use around 8GB ram, Windows is around 4GB ram and then Vram is around 5-8GB generally.
I do see how 10GB is probably the minimum amount of VRAM they could have put on the card, but the next gen consoles will not have access to a full 16GB for VRAM. The OS and the game will use some of this just to power the box and run the game.
So perhaps if we give the console the benefit of the doubt perhaps it will have 12GB of VRAM available to it to play with for games.
And do we really think the consoles OS + game ram only uses up 4GB...?
Games these days on the PC use around 8GB ram, Windows is around 4GB ram and then Vram is around 5-8GB generally.
Excellent. Now all those whinging about 10gb not being enough can buy that
I can see it now, in 12-18 months there will be one or two games worth buying that will not work on maximum texture settings with 10gb and you will get them saying ahaaa! See told you 10gb is not enough, to which I will respond with that's ok mate, I will be upgrading to a 4070/80 soon, in the mean time I will use one texture setting lower in those games
What are Nvidia playing at
https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/n...080-20gb-and-is-listing-geforce-rtx-3060.html
Why was the 3070 16 omitted?
Associate
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If anyone is interested my testing of allocated vs actual vram used with my RTX 3080 in a new game - Deliver Us the Moon.
4K with no RTX or DLSS 2.0 3.6gb vs 2.7gb
4k with RTX but no DLSS 2.0 5gb vs 4.1gb
4k with RTX and DLSS 2.0 Performance 3.4Gb vs 2.5GB
4k with RTX and DLSS 2.0 Balanced 3.6GB vs 2.7gb
4k with RTX and DLSS 2.0 Quality 3.8 vs 2.9 GB
4K with no RTX or DLSS 2.0 3.6gb vs 2.7gb
4k with RTX but no DLSS 2.0 5gb vs 4.1gb
4k with RTX and DLSS 2.0 Performance 3.4Gb vs 2.5GB
4k with RTX and DLSS 2.0 Balanced 3.6GB vs 2.7gb
4k with RTX and DLSS 2.0 Quality 3.8 vs 2.9 GB
now test doom eternal with ultra nightmare textures
Yes, followed by nightmare textures. Then take a screenshot of both and let’s see the difference
Out of curiosity what was the performance like?
Anyone at this point who still thinks that 10GB Vram is going to be an issue on the 3080 cards needs to go Google a bit more and do their homework, it's not a problem and your an idiot if you believe it is as you lack the basic understanding of how Vram especially 6x works.
@ Both of you
I understand that they allocate memory in chunks, however in the FS2020 example it is an extra 32%. That seems way too excessive to not be intentional.
Are they not able to dynamically change the memory allocation or do they have to allocate it all up front? I am assuming that it is dynamic (up to a certain point).
This extra memory that is allocated is their a perfomance hit if it cannot be allocated? for example with FS2020. Lets say you have two identical GPUs but one with 10GB of VRAM (enough for the 9.5GB that is used) and the other GPU with 13GB of VRAM (to hold the extra 3GB of bloat). Would these two GPUs have identical performance?
Do the engine engineers and the game devs not talk to each other. It seems to me that it would be in everyones best interest to ensure optimum performance of games (Ignoring the time and budget constraints). This sounds like an inefficient way to collaborate. I really hope that this isn't standard practise in the industry.
Why do you know this? Based on what?
Define playable? 60fps or 30fps?
While it will take more processing power to handle the extra data. How do you know that the reduction in frame rate from the increased demand on the GPU is greater than the reduction in frame rate from running out of VRAM?
From a quick google search the difference is in texture pop in and changes to how the engine handles LOD.Yes, followed by nightmare textures. Then take a screenshot of both and let’s see the difference
Talking about LOD. I came accross this video. Skip to 9 mins
Do you mean those 4 year old posts from reddit?
Yeah, that is interesting. I do not play that kind of game anyway and I do wonder if in the future they will start making use of 20gb+ of vram to load in higher LOD's and not bother to transition.
The truth is however in most cases they do not bother putting in any work to cater for the 1% of people who would have such cards.
I still maintain that 10gb will be fine for the most part even at 4K for the next couple of years. From what I can see it is enough for every single game out today and between now and the release of next gen it may not be enough on maybe a handful of games to run at highest texture setting. To me that is not a big deal personally, as there is negligible difference between the highest and one lower texture anyways generally speaking. I ain't paying hundreds of extra quid for that on a card I do not plan on keeping for a long time
Put it this way, if there was a huge difference in the two highest texture settings at 4K you can bet your bottom dollar someone would be posting about it trying to rub it in my face
Do you mean those 4 year old posts from reddit?
Yep.I doubt that the engine has changed significantly between the two games.
I suspect, they will either continue as is and simply increase the resolution of textures and geometry detail or they will change LOD distance to reduce pop in. Or a mix of both. We will find out soon enough.
It would be nice to hide behind cover in game and it doesn't look like a low res mess.
I doubt that the engine has changed significantly between the two games.
I suspect, they will either continue as is and simply increase the resolution of textures and geometry detail or they will change LOD distance to reduce pop in. Or a mix of both. We will find out soon enough.
It would be nice to hide behind cover in game and it doesn't look like a low res mess.
Associate
Yeah it's going to be absolute tops 10Gb available for vRAM-equivalent purposes, and honestly more likely to be closer to 8Gb. And that actually makes sense because the GPUs in these consoles are kinda 2070 territory in terms of TFLOPs performance, and that's an 8Gb card. These new consoles aren't going to set new standards for memory usage they're already behind what the PC can do by a generation and they're not even out yet. The consoles suffer the same bottlenecks the PC does, they have GPUs and vRAM equivalent, and you can't just load up like 12Gb worth of assets into vRAM and throw that at the kind of slow GPU they have, and expect good frame rates. They'll GPU bottleneck super fast.
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