I was wrong about VRAM…
In my last video with these cards I said that you don’t absolutely need 16GB of VRAM, and we did some tests with some of the more popular games people play – including myself – and yeah, I was wrong – sort of. A few people had an issue with my testing methodology, which is fair enough, although I think my biggest failing, as usual, was in my explanation. So in this video I want to do a bit more testing – with the same games but at ultra settings – and do a lot more explaining, so let’s get into it. For the most part I’m testing exclusively at 4K here to see how bad it gets, although for the few games that do break the 8GB limit I’ve tested at 1440p as well.
Amazingly, Cyberpunk on Ultra settings at 4K only uses 7.7GB of VRAM at most, or 7.3GB on average. While I’m sure enabling ray tracing would peak us over, we’re already at 44 FPS average here – that’s like Steam Deck levels of performance – so it’d be a slideshow, especially on these AMD cards. This is kind of illustrative of the point I was trying to make in the last video, which is that while some games will definitely eat up more than 8GB of VRAM, you’re likely to have pretty naff performance on either of these cards regardless.
Anyway, Helldivers 2 is in the same boat with a sub 60 FPS average at 54 FPS, and only 6.6 GB of VRAM usage at most. It’s worth noting that a lot of these games have some form of upscaling tech enabled either by default or as part of their presets. I’ve purposefully left them as-is, which does change the VRAM usage a little, but not significantly and it is very much expected behaviour, hence keeping them that way. Still, a sub 60 FPS result even with some upscaling really isn’t the best experience!
Starfield is one I tested at both 4K and 1440p, and also has upscaling enabled as part of the settings presets. At 4K we were getting just 48 FPS average, and 7.55 GB of VRAM usage at ultra settings. That still isn’t a limiting factor for the 8GB card – although the outright performance itself is. At 1440p the actual performance is better at 70.7 FPS average, although that still isn’t great, but VRAM usage falls equally, needing just 6.8GB at most to run Starfield of all games at 1440p on ultra settings.
As for the games that do exceed the 8GB cap, surprisingly the first up is Rainbow Six Siege. That even has an in-game stat that tells you how much VRAM it expects to use, and as far as I can tell it’s wildly off. It said something like 5.5GB of VRAM at 4K on “Ultra+” settings, but at least according to HWInfo, it actually used 8.3GB. Only JUST over the limit, at 4K, on the absolute highest settings. Now the catch here is that you’re only getting 106 FPS average, which sure for 4K is decent, but for a game like Siege that’s pretty terrible. You’d be at a pretty significant competitive disadvantage, like just in latency alone, you’ve gone from a couple of milliseconds to tens of milliseconds, and that’s not counting the smoothness difference either. Playing Siege at ultra+ settings is literally shooting yourself in the foot, so why would you?
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is next – that one was close to the limit on “higher” and sure, this is a game you’re more likely to care more about visuals than you do about the number of frames per second, so let’s see what “Highest” has to offer. At 4K you’re looking at 68 FPS average, and 9.7 GB of VRAM usage at most. Finally we’ve found a game that can even technically max out the 8GB card! Huzzah! At 68 FPS though I don’t think I’d be playing at max settings here, and I wouldn’t be playing at 4K on this type of card anyway. Interestingly though, at 1440p on “Highest” we get much better performance at 134 FPS, and still are just above the 8GB VRAM limit at 8.9GB peak, or 8.44 GB average. So we found a game that, on max settings, can exceed the 8GB limit, even at 1440p. Nice.
Finally, and amazingly worst VRAM usage of all, CS2. On “Very High” settings – which is an even worse idea than playing on ultra+ in Siege – at 4K we get just 57.6 FPS. Yep. Under 60 FPS, and 10GB of VRAM usage. To call playing on very high an idiotic move would be a bit of an understatement. Getting less than 60 FPS just to have the players that kill you look a touch sharper and better shaded is pretty hilarious, so I guess you do you there. At 1440p we are only a breath above 8GB at 8.26GB max, or 8.02GB on average, with a better, but still terrible, 125 FPS average. Again, for competitive games like CS or Siege, even if you play casually, you will hate life on max settings. Trust me.
One suggestion that was brought up from the last video was the game choice, namely more recent story based games, and even looking at Steve’s data from a 4060 Ti in games like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, The Last of Us Part 1, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Homeworld 3 and Hogwarts Legacy, you certainly can find settings that peak you over 8GB of VRAM usage, including at 1440p and sometimes even 1080p, and for sure if those are the games you want to play, and you’re ok with the performance hit from running at higher settings, then for sure, get the 16GB card. That’s where I messed up, not even mentioning that genre of games, and that yeah, for those games, you absolutely will see a noticeable benefit on the 16GB card.
The thing is though, my fight isn’t with the 16GB card here – it’s for the 8GB one. The running theme with the launch of this 8GB 9060 XT was that it is an ‘affront to humanity’ for even existing, and my point is that especially at the hefty discount it’s currently at, it very much still has a place. If you don’t fancy playing this niche of story based sloptimised games, you’re absolutely going to get the same experience on the 8GB card as you are on the 16GB one. You don’t need to be bullied into paying almost twice as much for 16GB of VRAM, when for a healthy majority of games, you simply don’t need it yet, and I suspect you’re going to run out of GPU horsepower before you run out of VRAM anyway. As I said in the first video, the 16GB card is undoubtedly better, and if the price difference was considerably smaller it’d be much easier to write the 8GB card off as irrelevant, but with this much money on the line, I can wholeheartedly see why you’d buy the 8GB – and you shouldn’t feel bad for doing so.
Also, I very much think that the fight should be at the games themselves, rather than the hardware. Games that are sucking back 10+GB of VRAM at freaking 1080p, even without Ray Tracing, that’s just poor game optimisation. Like surely we should be championing better game development, not railing on GPU makers for making ‘underspec’ GPUs for these poorly optimised games? Anyway, those are my thoughts on it.
