8GB isn’t enough for most PC gamers anymore, it seems
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How much VRAM should a graphics card for gaming have? This has been hotly debated over the past couple of years, especially as an increasing number of modern games push memory capacities to their limit. This is especially the case for 1440p or higher, but some games now struggle to run with 8GB of VRAM at 1080p, even with low settings in the case of Doom: The Dark Ages. As such, PC gamers are starting to ask for more memory.
We recently ran a poll to figure out what our readers intend to upgrade to next. The results reveal that at least 16-20GB is favored, with 40% of the vote at the time of writing against ~1500 responses. Just 3% of respondents say that 8GB is enough for them. We’ve left the poll up and running if you want to have your say below.
16GB seems to be the new gold standard
We should note that, according to the latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey, 8GB GPUs make up around a third of all users, with 12GB the next most popular with 18.82% of the share. So, it makes sense that PC gamers want to upgrade, not stick to the same amount of VRAM they already have. 28% of votes are directed towards 32GB of VRAM, a tier which is currently reserved for Nvidia’s flagship RTX 5090, which will still set you back around $3,000 these days, safely out of many people’s budgets.
Latest hardware leaks would suggest that AMD is ready to lift the baseline from 8GB to 12GB with its next-generation RDNA 5 cards. We’ve already seen Intel ditch 8GB with the Arc Battlemage range, starting at 10GB on the Arc B570. And on top of that, GPU sales figures tell us that people are avoiding 8GB GPUs where they can, with the most obvious examples being Nvidia’s RTX 5060 Ti and AMD’s RX 9060 XT – both models have 8GB and 16GB variants, and the high memory config is miles more popular.
AMD does claim that 8GB cards still have a market, and they wouldn’t be wrong, but it’s certainly a diminishing one.
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