16GB vs 8GB VRAM – How much does VRAM REALLY matter?
If you’re after a comparison between these two functionally identical cards, check out the video before this one on the channel or in the cards above, if you want to know how much 16GB of VRAM really matters in 2024, stick around! As a super brief catch-up, this is the RX 7600, a card with 8GB of VRAM, and this is the RX 7600 XT, a card with 16GB of VRAM. Despite the naming difference, the core in these two cards are functionally identical, with the only real difference being a slightly higher power limit, although as we saw in the last video there really wasn’t much of a difference between them. With that said, in this video I want to focus in on three games in particular: Starfield, as that did show a sizeable performance difference; Cyberpunk, because it didn’t; and Siege as an example of a more esports style title. I’ve tested these games with a bunch of different settings, and I’ve used HWInfo to capture both the D3D VRAM usage, and the system RAM usage, and we’re gonna see what the deal is here.
Let’s start with Starfield, as that, at least in theory, should be the most interesting as it did show a performance difference between the two cards – something almost every other game I tested failed to do, both at 1080p and 1440p. For these tests they are all at 1440p though. On low settings, where I’d be expecting people with 7600 and 7600 XT’s to be playing at, we do see a decent performance difference between the cards, but surprisingly this doesn’t seem to be VRAM related. Both cards use functionally the same VRAM amount at 5.4GB for the XT, and 5.2GB for the 7600. That is nowhere near either card’s maximum, and looking at system RAM usage it’s clear the 7600 isn’t overflowing, as it ended up using LESS system RAM than the XT did!
On the medium preset we get the same performance advantage, at least in terms of a percentage, and again it’s functionally the same VRAM usage. In fact, the 7600 uses 100MB more both on average and at max, to deliver 14% less performance. Amazing. On the high preset, the performance advantage actually comes down, and VRAM usage has increased to around 6GB, but that’s still 2GB shy of the 7600’s capacity, so clearly that isn’t a problem. Again, system RAM usage is higher on the XT, showing that the 7600’s VRAM isn’t spilling into system RAM. Lastly at ultra we get the same 15% or so faster performance on the XT from the 7600, although the VRAM usage still isn’t maxing out the 7600 with just 6.5GB of usage AT MOST between the two cards. System RAM usage is still lower on the 7600, so it’s pretty clear that Starfield, at 1440p anyway, even on ultra settings, doesn’t need more than 8GB of VRAM.
Moving onto Cyberpunk, as we saw in the last video there really wasn’t much of a performance difference between the two cards, and unsurprisingly with the same settings that hasn’t changed. What is interesting is that on low the XT actually used less system RAM, by a full gigabyte – both on average and at maximum. Despite that, the reported VRAM usage was only 5.5 GB for the 7600, so it’s hard to believe that higher RAM usage is from the VRAM spilling over. Let’s look at some more settings and see if that trend continues.
On the medium preset the RAM usage is functionally identical, as is the VRAM usage. RAM is sitting at 12.6GB for the XT and 13.5 GB for the 7600, with VRAM at 5.7 and 5.5 GB respectively. Those figures are functionally the same as the low preset, despite having 20 FPS lower performance on average. Despite that, there is still functionally no difference between the two cards.
On high we finally see a jump in VRAM usage, up to 6.8GB at most, and interesting the XT seems to catch up in RAM usage, and importantly for determining if the 7600 is using system RAM as VRAM, the system RAM usage hasn’t moved at all between settings, despite the BRAM usage going up by a full gigabyte. To me that suggests it isn’t using the system RAM – yet anyway. Ultra is again remarkably similar in memory usage, with only a 15 FPS drop on average to denote any difference. Seriously, you’d be hard-pressed to work out which is which without that performance difference.
To spice things up a bit – and to give us any chance of exceeding the 8GB limit on the 7600 – I stuck it on the Ray Tracing Ultra preset. This isn’t what you’d actually play on – especially on one of these cards – but looking at the results it does finally show us what we’re looking for. The XT used 8.8 GB of VRAM, but the 7600 obviously doesn’t have 8.8GB to spare, so system RAM went up accordingly. Importantly too, the XT’s system RAM usage DIDN’T go up, so that gives us some confirmation that the 7600 did need to dip into RAM to get this working. It didn’t dip far though, with under 1GB of spill-over. So, for Cyberpunk, if you’re playing at 1440p on ray tracing ultra, yeah, you need more than 8GB of VRAM, but my god don’t play on ray tracing ultra on these cards. It’s a slideshow…
As for Siege, as you might expect with this being a more esports-style title, this is pretty well optimised, both for performance and for things like memory utilisation. On low both cards average functionally the same 322 FPS, and use functionally the same VRAM at 4 GB, although the XT did use 1GB more of system RAM. Not a huge difference though. On the medium preset we do get a bit more VRAM usage at 4.6/4.7GB, and interestingly it seems the XT had a bit less stability too, but there isn’t much in it. Now, seeing as there isn’t that much interesting here I’m going to skip straight to ultra, where, well, this isn’t much interesting. VRAM usage is now at 6GB – where the game reckoned more like 4GB – but the two cards used functionally the same amount, and the XT was consistently 1GB higher in system RAM usage, so clearly the 7600 wasn’t full. Performance remained the same between the cards too, so in short, siege only needs like 6GB of VRAM at most, and realistically anyone playing siege even remotely competitively would be playing at medium or low anyway, so it really doesn’t matter much here. If you’ve only got 4GB of VRAM, well that’s more of a problem as even at low these cards, at 1440p, used a touch more than that, but if you have 6 or 8GB, or more, you’re fine.
So, do you need 16GB of VRAM in 2024? Well at least for this class of card, no, not really – at least for gaming at 1440p. If you’re gaming at 4K, yeah maybe, if you’re gaming at ultra settings on more intensive games like Cyberpunk, yeah maybe, but you’d be buying a 7900 XTX or 4090 for that, not a 7600. Now these figures are likely to grow over time, especially if we see a new generation of consoles that come with more memory, but at least for this class of card, like I said in the last video, you’re more likely to want to upgrade the GPU core before you absolutely must have 16GB of VRAM, so unless you have another use case for that VRAM like running AI tools or productivity tasks like video editing, you might be better saving your cash and getting the 7600 instead.
