We are at a point where some modern titles now use 8GB+ of VRAM at *720p*. What is a Budget Gamer™ to do?
We are at a point where some modern titles now use 8GB+ of VRAM at *720p*. What is a Budget Gamer™ to do?
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This is going to get me stoned to death on the streets of PCMR, but I have a secret to tell you.
While VRAM usage *does* increase with higher resolutions, the bulk of it is in graphical settings. Playing at low/medium or turning off ray tracing (if applicable) has a **much** bigger impact on VRAM usage than resolution does. Once your VRAM runs out, it loads assets into regular RAM which takes **way** longer for the GPU to access than its own VRAM, which slows down games significantly. So you do want to try to stay under at least like 90% VRAM usage.
buy one of those modified chinese 2080ti w/ 22gb
bro its ark….
ark is literally one of the worst optimized games that ever existed. you arent getting low FPS because of VRAM, you are getting low fps because the game is horribly optimized
even cards with 24gb VRAM struggle with ARK because optimization is so shit
Play a game made by a competent studio. 8gb of VRAM is enough for 1080p gaming, unless said game is an unoptimized pile of rocks
It’s just that ASA isn’t optimized much, and the graphics settings are too high, even at “low” they look high
Allocation =/= Required
if one of the 50 series card have an 8gb of vram im switching to amd forever , it’s been nothing but mockery with these ai powered cheap paper weights
ark asa is just also terribly optimized. 8 gigs will be enough for maybe 2-3 more years then i see 10-12 becoming standard
Play optimized games?
I’m gonna go full prepperidge farm remembers and ol’ granpa let’s get you back to bed…
But i have fond memories from childhood when we played tons of games that were stuttering and glitching and we still finished numerous games and had tonnes of fun
Edit: man i remember my brothers efforts to finish Crysis Warhead. It was not about him being able to finish a game on medium difficultly, it was a combined effort of man and machine. That train mission, oh boy…
I believe amd gpus have more vram
Go AMD, not only budget friendly but they generally have more VRAM. There’s more to it than this simple solution, but that’s an option.
stop playing trash unoptimized games
Ah yea the new Ark reskin. Buddy of mine picked it up (has a 4070) and tried to get me to grab it (980ti). Looked at some stats and best I could hope for would be 30fps @ 720p. Noped out.
I get 50-70fps on low/medium 1080p on HD2
That is Ark ASA.
Probably not the best example of a game to use for this. Both Ark ASA and ASE are held together with sticky tape, bubble gum and Hopes & Dreams.
Simple, don’t buy unoptimized dumpsterfires. There was never as many games available to play as it is now, you have hundreds of games from past decade alone, lots of ports and remasters and even in 2024 plenty of games coming up with decent graphics and reasonable requirements, so unless you chasing hype trains, there is no shortage of games to play for foreseen future. If anything there is more games then free time to play them, i recently got into yakuza games and just imagining how long it gonna take me to beat whole series (even without spinoffs) makes me feel overwhelmed.
I wouldn’t worry about it for ark. Thats just ark being ark
Lower texture quality and shadow map resolution, you don’t have the VRAM for it nor it improves the quality much at that lower resolution.
buy less candles
OP: I don’t want my food to taste like shit!
Reddit: Then don’t eat shit
OP: But I WANT to eat shit
Some games allocate the ram but dont actually use it
Budget gamers should be buying used/refurbished 1080ti’s.
Play older games
Maybe stop using ultra settings?
Who are you trying to fool?
That is a 1080p image, **WITH** AA on top.
You couldn’t even fake a 720p image?
Don’t play garbage games like ark.
Bro ark survival ascended runs bad on a 4090 it’s not the vram that’s the problem
Yeah No thats Just ARK Survival Ascended
They didnt optimize the meshes on the maps at all because they have been forced to release it WAAAAAY too early by Snail Games, Snail had a agreement with the Server provider Nitrado
If ASA didnt launch this early last year Snail wouldve lost a lot of Money
They partly did it on the new map Scorched earth, which still runs bad but way better than the island
Its a really sad state asa is in, since its a UE5 game it normally takes a lot of vram, thats Just the engine, but ARK Just isnt optimized at all
Dawg even my friend who got a 4080 Super recently says the performance is horrible, and thats a 1000€ GPU
Which is really really frustraiting because ASA is actually pretty fun once you got it working mostly properly
If ARK is your only example, then upgrade or play something else. That game is unoptimized af even today and is notoriously known for that fact.