Correct me if I'm wrong but there have been a few cards in the recent past which had two different amounts of VRAM, same GPU. As far as I was aware the ones with more VRAM aged better? i.e. still useable and even with lower settings they could still perform better than the lower VRAM versions, which would have to lower setting even further.
Of course if you're comparing exactly the same models with only difference being vram then the higher vram model will age better over the long run, question is how long will it take for them benefits of having more vram to "really" show though? e.g. look at the 290s (I had the 4GB model), it took a long time (years) for the 8GB model to really show its benefit over the 4gb model and whilst the 290 4gb model had to sacrifice more settings or/and primarily the texture settings, the 8gb model perf. wasn't exactly anything to shout home about either and still had to reduce just as many settings to get acceptable fps, by that time, you had far better and cheaper gpus available. Any PC gamer, even a budget gamer would more than likely be upgrading to a new gpu after 3/4 years (where even a low end tier gpu would beat a 3/4 year high end gpu).
Then the other consideration point is price, how much extra is more vram worth? Would you say the extra £600+ for 2GB more over the 3080 is worth it? Bearing in mind, you'll probably be able to pick up a 4070, which will match/beat a 3090 for £500-600....
The key is to buying a card with the right balance and upgrading when is best to achieve a significant leap in perf. i.e. I think 8gb is too little for 1440 and above going forward (especially where amd sponsored titles are concerned) but 10gb should be fine for the majority of things. Look at the 2080ti, has more vram than the 3080 yet still loses in pretty much every gaming scenario. As I always say, why do people upgrade their gpus? Is it solely for more vram and nothing else? Or is it for the performance it outputs?
Not to mention, for all we know once direct storage gets properly used in games (hoping sooner than later), it might completely change up the vram situation i.e. vram amount (within reason) might not be as much of a consideration due to the way the assets get streamed in (at least that is theory of it according to nvidia and linustechtips video on it)
Anyway, while modded Skyrim, Flight with tons of mods, etc. might be niche there are a few people here who are interested in that niche.
I heavily modded both skyrim and fallout 4 not long back there, as well as other games like gta 5 redux with mods and no issues at all. Only cyberpunk with the several 4-8k texture packs has had issues with vram.
Correct me if I'm wrong but surely the RAM's just holding textures? Increasing texture quality barely affects performance in my experience. My 8gb RX480 is still playing almost anything on HIGH with ULTRA textures for this reason.
More or less is. See bit above in response to troezar. Although reducing other settings can also reduce vram usage (not to mention if using dlss and fsr), obviously not as much as the texture setting though.
.
Hopefully in time for the avatar game!
more the users who buy and run for quite a few years. Often the cards are still capable, but they start to run out of VRAM as the games get more demanding. Almost as if by design...
