And it will only get worse
Recently, a review of the Hardware Unboxed channel made a lot of noise on the Web, as it followed that video cards with 8 GB of memory today are already poorly suited for many modern games. In an interview with the well-known channel Moore’s Law Is Dead, the developer working with Unreal Engine 5 actually confirmed the theses of the review, at the same time explaining why high-performance video cards today need at least 12 GB of video memory.
One of the main reasons why modern games need 12 GB of memory is due to the specifications of modern consoles. Both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X come with 16GB of total memory, of which the GPU can consume just 12GB. And many multiplatform games are developed primarily for consoles. Having to optimize them for PCs with weak graphics cards is extra work.
An additional problem in this case is the upcoming full transition to next-generation consoles, when developers stop creating new games, including for PS4 and Xbox One.
A small amount of video memory can be a problem even in not the highest resolution. According to a podcast guest, many developers claim that the upcoming GeForce RTX 4060, with its 8 GB of memory, which is attributed to it, will not cope well with modern games in resolutions higher than Full HD. Against this background, it is noticeable that the RTX 3060 has 12 GB of memory.
Unreal Engine developer explains why modern games need at least 12 GB of memory for video cards
The interlocutors also discussed Direct Storage technology, which is just beginning to appear in games. The author of the podcast told how his friend spoke with an Nvidia representative at the GDC. When they broached the topic of Direct Storage, the latter stated that for this technology to work properly on a PC, you need 32 GB of video memory! True, it is not very clear what is meant by normal, because in the same Forspoken technology works great and gives impressive results.
The developer also told why, in fact, modern games require so much video memory. It’s all about much more modern graphics and the spread of 4K resolution. In modern games, there are much more high-resolution textures, unique textures even for small objects like stones and walls, in games the detail and elaboration of objects has significantly increased. For example, before the texture could consist of 5000 polygons, and now it is 500,000 or even several million in the case of Unreal Nanite technology. That is, there is an increase of two or three orders of magnitude.
In general, the situation for video cards with 8 GB of memory or less is getting pretty deplorable and, according to the podcast guest, things will get even worse in the near future.
Actually, AMD just reminded today that its video cards offer 16 GB of memory even in the $500 segment. How much memory the more affordable next generation Radeon adapters will have is anyone’s guess, but in Nvidia’s case, we already know for sure that the $600 RTX 4070 offers 12 GB , and all available leaks say that the RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti will get only 8 GB of memory.
