this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Do PC gamers feel 12GB of VRAM is simply not enough for the money in 2024?

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[–] [email protected] 246 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Remember when eVGA decided they would rather leave the market entirely than spend one more day working with Nvidia?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I wish they would have started putting out AMD products. Powercolor just doesn't feel like a flagship partner like evga was to nvidia.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

I would've actually switched to AMD if EVGA did

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 73 points 9 months ago (9 children)

Yup. It was something like 90% of their revenue, but 25% of their profit.

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[–] [email protected] 138 points 9 months ago

Yep, it's the RAM, but also just a mismatched value proposition.

I think it's clear at this point Nvidia is trying to have it both ways and gamers are sick of it. They used pandemic shortage prices as an excuse to inflate their entire line's prices, thinking they could just milk the "new normal" without having to change their plans.

But when you move the x070 series out of the mid-tier price bracket ($250-450, let's say), you better meet a more premium standard. Instead, they're throwing mid-tier RAM into a premium-priced project that most customers still feel should be mid-tier priced. It also doesn't help that it's at a time where people generally just have less disposable income.

[–] [email protected] 128 points 9 months ago (2 children)

GPUs haven't been reasonably priced since the 1000 series.

And now there's no coin mining promising some money back.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (7 children)

You mean Nvidia GPUs? I got my 6750XT for 500€, and I think it's a good price for the performance I get.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 9 months ago (3 children)

That is still overpriced i think. Although, much less egregious than what Nv is doing. Launch msrp for a HD7850, which was the same category as the 6700XT today (upper middle tier) was 250 usd. A few years prior the 4850 started at 200 usd. Even the Rx 480 started at only 230 usd. And those were all very decent cards in their time.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The new mining is AI... TSMC is at max capacity. They're not going to waste too many wafers making gaming GPU when AI acceleratora are selling for $30k each

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[–] [email protected] 95 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Nvidia over pricing their cards and limiting stock, acting like there is still a gpu shortage from all the crypto bros sucking everything up.

Right now, their competitors are beating them at hundreds of dollars below nvidias mrp like for like with the only true advantage nvidia has is in ray tracing and arguably VR.

It's possible we're approaching another shorter with the AI bubble though for the moment that seems to be pretty far off.

TL;DR Nvidia is trying to sell a card at twice it's value cause greed.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (8 children)

They're beating AMD at ray tracing, upsampling (DLSS vs FSR), VR, and especially streaming (NVENC). For the latter look at the newly announced beta partnership with Twitch and OBS which will bring higher quality transcoding and easier setup only for Nvidia for now and soon AV1 encoding only for Nvidia (at first anyway).

The raw performance is mostly there for AMD with the exception of RT, and FSR has gotten better. But Nvidia is doing Nvidia shit and using the software ecosystem to entrench themselves despite the insane pricing.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

Couldn't agree more! Abstracting to a general economic case -- those hundreds of dollars are a double digit percentage of the overall cost! Double digit % cost increase for single digit % performance doesn't quite add up @nvidia :)

Especially with Google going with TPUs for their AI monstrosities it makes less and less sense at large scale for a consumers to pay the Nvidia tax just for CUDA compatibility. Especially with the entrance of things like SYCL that help programmers avoid vendor lock.

[–] [email protected] 84 points 9 months ago (10 children)

Why people no buy our GPU anymore?

Because I can get a whole fucking console for the price of a lower midrange GPU. My only hope is Intel's Battlemage at this point.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago

yeah but then you have to play a console without mods or cheap games

try buying a used GPU and game on 1080p monitor and you'll be able to have great graphics without a lot of money

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (9 children)

My RTX 4060 has 16GB of RAM. What on earth makes them think people would go for 12GB?

[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Not being a power of 2 gives me displeasure.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 65 points 9 months ago (1 children)

My Nvidia 1070 with 8gb vram is still playing all of my games. Not everything gets Ultra, nor my monitor isn't 4K. Forever I am the "value buyer". It's hard to put money into something that is marginally better though. I thought 16g would be a no-brainer.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 9 months ago (7 children)

Exactly, people get to caught up in the Digital Foundry-ification of ultra max settings running at a perfect ~120 unlocked frames. Relax my dudes and remember the best games of your life were perfect dark with your friends running at 9 FPS.

1080p is fine, medium settings are fine. If the game is good you won't sweat the details.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago

remember the best games of your life were perfect dark with your friends running at 9 FPS.

The frame rate was shat on at the time and with good reason, that was unplayable for me. Best times were Halo 4-16 local multiplayer.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (3 children)

As someone who really doesn't care much for game graphics I feel that a comment I wrote a few months ago also fits here:

I’ve never really cared much about graphics in video games, and a game can still be great with even the simplest of graphics - see the Faith series, for example. Interesting story and still has some good scares despite the 8-bit graphics.

To me many of these games with retro aesthetics (either because they’re actually retro or the dev decided to go with a retro style) don’t really feel dated, but rather nostalgic and charming in their own special way.

And many other people also don’t seem to care much about graphics. Minecraft and Roblox are very popular despite having very simplistic graphics, and every now and then a new gameplay video about some horror game with a retro aesthetic will pop up on my recommended, and so far I’ve never seen anyone complain about the graphics, only compliments about them being interesting, nostalgic and charming.

Also I have a potato PC, and it can’t run these modern 8K FPS games anyway, so having these games with simpler graphics that I can actually run is nice. But maybe that’s just me.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 9 months ago (10 children)

600 $ for a card without 16 GB of VRAM is a big ask. I think getting a RX 7800 XT for 500 $ will serve you well for a longer time.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago (1 children)

less than 20gb of vram in 2024?

The entire 40 series line of cards should be used as evidence against nvidia in a lawsuit surrounding intentional creation of e waste

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago

4070 is $600. That seems like total shit to me. That's why.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago

The RAM is so lame. It really needed more.

Performance exceeding the 3090, but limited by 12 gigs of RAM .

[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You all should check prices comparing dual fan 3070’s to 4070’s they are a $40 difference on Amazon. Crazy to see. They completely borked their pricing scheme trying to get whales and crypto miners to suck their 40 series dry and wound up getting blue balled hard.

Aren’t they taking the 4080 completely off the market too?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

Aren’t they taking the 4080 completely off the market too?

Apparently they stopped production of it months ago. Whatever still exists on shelves is only there because nobody has been buying them.

Honestly this has been the worst 80-class Nvidia card ever. The GTX 480 was a complete joke but even that managed to sell ok.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Wait, they didn't put the 4070 super at 16 GB?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago

They clearly believe customers will always buy nvidia over amd so why bother competing just make an annoyingly segmented lineup.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Nope. Even my 3080 Ti has 12Gb. I was waiting for the 4000 series refresh but i think I'll just wait and see what the 5000 series looks like.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago

laughs in 6800XT

[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (8 children)

I mean yeah when I‘m searching for GPUs I specifically filter out anything that‘s less than 16GB of VRAM. I wouldn‘t even consider buying it for that reason alone.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (8 children)

I haven't paid attention to GPUs since I got my 3080 on release day back in Covid.

Why has acceptable level of VRAM suddenly doubled vs 4 years ago? I don't struggle to run a single game on max settings at high frames @ 1440p, what's the benefit that justifies the cost of 20gb VRAM outside of AI workloads?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago (1 children)

An actual technical answer: Apparently, it's because while the PS5 and Xbox Series X are technically regular x86-64 architecture, they have a design that allows the GPU and CPU to share a single pool of memory with no loss in performance. This makes it easy to allocate a shit load of RAM for the GPU to store textures very quickly, but it also means that as the games industry shifts from developing for the PS4/Xbox One X first (both of which have separate pools of memory for CPU & GPU) to the PS5/XSX first, VRAM requirements are spiking up because it's a lot easier to port to PC if you just keep the assumption that the GPU can handle storing 10-15 GB of texture data at once instead of needing to refactor your code to reduce VRAM usage.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Lmao

We have your comment: what am I doing with 20gb vram?

And one comment down: it's actually criminal there is only 20gb vram

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (10 children)

I don't know about everyone else, but I still play at 1080. It looks fine to me and I care more about frames than fidelity. More VRAM isn't going to help me here so it is not a factor when looking at video cards. Ignoring the fact I just bought a 4070, I wouldn't not skip over a 4070 Super just because it has 12GB of RAM.

This is a card that targets 1440p. It can pull weight at 4k, but I'm not sure if that is justification to slam it for not having the memory for 4k.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago

It can pull weight at 4k, but I'm not sure if that is justification to slam it for not having the memory for 4k.

There are many games that cut it awfully close with 12GB at 1440p, for some it's actually not enough. And when Nvidia pushes Raytracing as hard as they do, not giving us the little extra memory we need for that is just a dick move.

Whatever this card costs, 12GB of vram is simply not appropriate.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

insert linus torvalds nvidia clip here

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (3 children)

So many options, with small differences between them, all overpriced to the high heavens. I'm sticking with my GTX 1070 since it serves my needs and I'll likely keep using it a few years beyond that out of spite. It cost $340 at the time I bought it (2016) and I thought that was somewhat overpriced. According to an inflation calculator, that's $430 in today's dollars.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

What's going on? It's overpriced and completely unnecessary for most people. There's also a cost of living crisis.

I play every game I want to on high graphics with my old 1070. Unless you're working on very graphically intensive apps or you're a pc master race moron then there's no need for new cards.

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