I agree, yet he did say he can count on one hand where it has stuttered due to the lack of VRAM so it can obviously be a bit of an issue now. I personally think 8gb will be fine for a while (if you already have 8gb) However, if I was investing now, and I wanted the card to last me 5yrs+ then id probably seek a card with more VRAM.
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Is 8GB of Vram enough for the 3070
- Thread starter chaparral
- Start date
I agree, yet he did say he can count on one hand where it has stuttered due to the lack of VRAM so it can obviously be a bit of an issue now. I personally think 8gb will be fine for a while (if you already have 8gb) However, if I was investing now, and I wanted the card to last me 5yrs+ then id probably seek a card with more VRAM.
Caporegime
You forgot AMDs 5700 XT, currently in stock for £480
Ha
Kept it to NV stock but genuine question. If a gamer has £500 to spend on a GFX card what is the recommended card from that list? As apparently the 3070 is overpriced the recommended requirements is a 1060 though? my 5700xt should be able to max it out?
depending on your resolution - prospective mods? i have a 60hz 4k monitor - i cancelled my 3080 order as i was in the 1000s so hopefully will get the 3070 in time for launch of 2077 and i can live with 1440p 60fps in ultra if it can do that.
Soldato
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Definitely, people are too invested in their posessions and have somehow that has become slavish obedience to the corps that make them. Even when they're getting seriously short-changed with VRAM, people are happy just to accept it, no-one four years ago would have dreamed a 80 and 70 stack cards were coming in with 8GB and 10GB...yet here we are. Can you imagine suggesting in 2016 to this forum that NV (we'll see what AMD comes up with) would still be stuck @ 8GB for £500 cards, and 10GB for £700 cards? you'd have been laughed off the forum!
I've hammered NV for their poor track record on VRAM, their proven lies about the 970 NOT having the memory is was advertised with (case closed in every sense no need to go over that unless you're unto revisionist History), the laughable 3GB 1060, and for their lowly 10GB on the 3080 and the propsoed 8GB of the 3070. It's pathetic in 2020, cards costing a quarter of what the 3080 is going for had 8GB for years ago. That's indefensible. IF AMD unveil they're cards with gimped VRAM like NV's I will hammer them too.
IMO you have to seperate two issues here, firstly is what what you "need" or what is "enough", and secondly what you "should" getting in 2020/21 for your money. First is case specific and endlessly debateble, I would not disagree with anyone who came down on either side, secondly though what you should be getting is cut and dried there's no way on earth the consumer should be paying these prices for 2016's low end mid range VRAM. And that has been my arguement all along, not what's needed, it's what you SHOULD be getting.
You can buy today a £170 card @ OCUK (probably cheaper elewhere too but that's besides the point) with 8GB of VRAM...that says it all. The 3070 is going to be around 3-4 times that price. It blows my mimd that people can't see this. Again is AMD's new competing cards come with similair gimped VRAM I will hammer them too.
yeah im on a 1440p monitor, so hopefully ill be ok. my main reason for wanting a new card is for ray tracing on Cyberpunk which is quite an expensive premium for something which isn't a necessity.
Can that £170 card run games at their top/ultra settings @ 144hz / 1440p? If not, then your argument is almost pointless.
Soldato
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Another NV VRAM ripoff. 8GB for what will be a £400-£500 (at least) card in 2020-21?
Haha its fine, leather jacket man said so.
Everybody, its Nvidia afterall.
Soldato
Soldato
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Nvidia dropped the ball....3070/10GB, 3080/12GB should have been logic for 4K gaming, but completely logical if you have to upgrade in 12 mths rather than 3 years.
You just blew his mind.
His point is from a cost pov not performance.
As far as I can tell, no-one can demonstrate in the games we are playing that the 8GB card is completely gimped and destroying performance. £170 card has the same VRAM, so what? If didn't have to turn off most of the settings on my GTX 980 even when I was running at 1080p then I wouldn't be looking for a new GFX card in the first place. How are the 3000 series cards being absolutely slated on here but not a word on the 2000 series cards that a joke for the price.
The only consumers that might have an argument in regards to value are those sitting on 1080TI cards.
Soldato
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Of course it can't it's card from 2016, it's not supposed to. Did I argue that it did? did I make a cost/performance comparison with a low end card from 2016? Nope.
My argument is 4 years down the line a card costing 3-4 times as much should should not have the same 8GB of VRAM, and neither should the 80 card have only 10GB...not sure how many times I have to spell that out. It's simply about cost/value.
Associate
I've spent a while thinking about this point of view and trying to work out how anyone could possibly hold this, because to me it just seems obviously wrong, and I think I've narrowed it down. And maybe that can narrow some of this gap between peoples understanding if we can get at the root cause of this.
There's this underlying expectation, as you said, what you "SHOULD" get and this seems entirely based on the history of what we've got in the past and then extrapolating into the future. But you have to understand that this is a fundamentally flawed way of thinking, it presumes things can carry on indefinitely, and they cannot. Technology is a sector that has had a lot of exponential growth largely thanks to Moore's law. Specifically in computing we get most of our additional computational power and memory capacity through being able to put more transistors into a small space. But this is not something that can go on forever, we know that Moore's law will come to an end as we run into the limits of physical systems. And we're starting to see the effects of that now, Jensen even said this explicitly in CES in 2019.
You reference people on a forum laughing off someone who would tell them we'd not see doubling of performance in future, but this is not an authority for anything. Those people if they would do such a thing would be WRONG to do that, and using that as baseline for judging what you SHOULD get in future is also wrong. This is a harsh truth that you will have swallow either now or pretty soon in future.
In reality when you set aside expectations about what you should get, or what you feel like you deserve, the actual way products are priced is you add up the costs associated with producing the product, of which one of them is memory, and then you add profit margin on top of that, normally some certain % you're aiming for. This means if you add more memory onto your product, your cost to manufacture it goes up and you need to put the price up for the consumer. Because people don't like paying a lot of money you don't want to have anymore memory on your video card than you need, because otherwise you have to charge more. You're saying that your argument is not what is needed but it ought to be! Otherwise all you're advocating is putting more memory onto a card than it needs and increasing its cost with no benefit.
You've talked about the vRAM being "gimped", and people being "short changed", and people being "stuck @ 8Gb" but you're completely ignoring the fact that all the testing that has been done shows no games come anywhere close to this limit today and some games are GPU limited already before getting to 10Gb of usage which is a solid indicator that even future games wont be able to make use of 10Gb of vRAM, the GPU will simply be too much of a bottleneck.
Anyway I hope that is somewhat of an olive branch to people that feel like they're getting short changed. You need to be really careful about your expectations of what you should get. The costs to build this technology is naturally increasing and will continue to increase in future unless there's a serious paradigm shift. Plenty of people have warned about the end of Moore's law, that we're on a gravy train of doubling power for a good 50 years but that is coming to an end. As it does come to an end your expectations will have to change to stay in line with reality. The prices of video cards going up is not because Nvidia is short changing you and pocketing that money like some kind of weird evil monopoly guy, it's legitimately costing more to produce faster and higher capacity components. You compared 8Gb now to 8Gb 4 years ago, and a cursory google of the cost of 8Gb of GDDR5 vRAM 4 years ago is way cheaper ($6.50 per Gb) than GDDR6 ($11.69) and we know that GDDR6x prices are higher but there's no good sources on exactly how much.
So you are upset that games are using 5GB of VRAM out of 8 instead of 5GB of VRAM out of 10/12/16? What difference does it make if you don't need to use it?
Soldato
For 1440p 8gb right now is OK. Doom Eternal will use over 7 on Nightmare, but at 4k it will over flow the memory buffer. I don't base cards on what they can do. It matters more to me on what they can't. Like, for example right if a card does not have enough VRAM for even one game at 4k? then it is not a 4k card. Why do I look at it like this? because basically the price of these cards when compared to other gaming equipment.
So, let's take a look at a couple of examples here. Firstly, why is Nvidia's review guide using 1440p for the 3070? quite simply? if they used 4k then in at least a couple of modern (and heck, even old ones like Shadow Of Mordor at 4k !) the VRAM would run out. Ironically Nvidia used this to their advantage when they paid Eurogamer to big up the 3080. Doom Eternal was used, because it was a game that likes more VRAM than the 2080 they were comparing it to has.
Note how the 8gb 2080 (note I specifically mention the 8gb) is able to easily beat the 1080Ti at every resolution on those settings. Right up until you reach 4k, and the 2080 performance all of a sudden falls off a cliff. The 1080Ti handily beats it with ease at 4k. This is, quite simply, because the VRAM limit has been breached and it is now streaming textures in and out of the VRAM from the system memory. Which is massively inferior to VRAM, as has every other way this has been attempted in the past has been (it used your paging file on your mech hard drive in the beginning).
So, it should not simply be "Is 8gb on the 3070 enough" it should be "Which resolutions is it enough for". Hint - not 4k.
Thus, even though it all seems very close at 1440p with the 2080Ti all I would theoretically need to do is crank the res to 4k in Doom Eternal, up the settings to Nightmare or beyond and your 3070 is already falling on its face before it has even been launched.
Which is OK. You know? it's £500 which is a lot of money, but at a certain resolution in certain cherry picked games it does as well as a 2080Ti.
The problem as I see it? XBSX £450. Runs 4k. XB cheapo model? runs 1440p and is considerably cheaper than a 3070, plus the extra £500 in parts to make it a complete PC and of course then a monitor, keyboard, mouse, desk.
Of all of Nvidia's worries right now? I would say the 3070 is likely to be their biggest. Mostly because it is the card that will sell by the truckload, yet AMD's competitor has double that amount and CAN be a 4k card. When clearly the 3070 just isn't.
So, let's take a look at a couple of examples here. Firstly, why is Nvidia's review guide using 1440p for the 3070? quite simply? if they used 4k then in at least a couple of modern (and heck, even old ones like Shadow Of Mordor at 4k !) the VRAM would run out. Ironically Nvidia used this to their advantage when they paid Eurogamer to big up the 3080. Doom Eternal was used, because it was a game that likes more VRAM than the 2080 they were comparing it to has.
Note how the 8gb 2080 (note I specifically mention the 8gb) is able to easily beat the 1080Ti at every resolution on those settings. Right up until you reach 4k, and the 2080 performance all of a sudden falls off a cliff. The 1080Ti handily beats it with ease at 4k. This is, quite simply, because the VRAM limit has been breached and it is now streaming textures in and out of the VRAM from the system memory. Which is massively inferior to VRAM, as has every other way this has been attempted in the past has been (it used your paging file on your mech hard drive in the beginning).
So, it should not simply be "Is 8gb on the 3070 enough" it should be "Which resolutions is it enough for". Hint - not 4k.
Thus, even though it all seems very close at 1440p with the 2080Ti all I would theoretically need to do is crank the res to 4k in Doom Eternal, up the settings to Nightmare or beyond and your 3070 is already falling on its face before it has even been launched.
Which is OK. You know? it's £500 which is a lot of money, but at a certain resolution in certain cherry picked games it does as well as a 2080Ti.
The problem as I see it? XBSX £450. Runs 4k. XB cheapo model? runs 1440p and is considerably cheaper than a 3070, plus the extra £500 in parts to make it a complete PC and of course then a monitor, keyboard, mouse, desk.
Of all of Nvidia's worries right now? I would say the 3070 is likely to be their biggest. Mostly because it is the card that will sell by the truckload, yet AMD's competitor has double that amount and CAN be a 4k card. When clearly the 3070 just isn't.
Soldato
Oh and just as the final nail.
Even Nvidia know 8gb isn't enough for 4k.
Even Nvidia know 8gb isn't enough for 4k.
Oh and just as the final nail.
Even Nvidia know 8gb isn't enough for 4k.
I found that interesting too. All other Ampere benchmarks provided by Nvidia have been measured at 4k but now they decided to use 1440p for the RTX3070 LOL
Good post and I agree with most of it. I think the new consoles are incredible value at their price point but you also need to take into consideration the cost of a high quality TV. Especially if you want the frame rate unlocked for certain games. So you have compromises depending on what you purchased. Also the previews we are seeing will be the same old story. Probably 4k locked at 30fps if you are lucky. PC has more opportunity at throwing real grunt at the problem to raise the frame rate. I 100% agree if you want to future proof in 4k. Get a 3080 or look at AMD offerings.
I'm looking for 1440p gaming at 144hz for as long as possible within a budget. I'm not against looking at what AMD has to offer either.
Also on the 2nd hand market the prices have not dropped that low yet. Maybe once more people get their 3080 it will but at the moment i've been monitoring the members market, gumtree and facebook market place with the offerings being slim to none.