To make it worse: the 8600GT was $159 ($246 after inflation), the GTX 1060 was $249 ($332 after inflation), and the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB is $429, and not even the base model.
AMD is almost just as guilty here with their new RX 9060XT 8GB.
To make it worse: the 8600GT was $159 ($246 after inflation), the GTX 1060 was $249 ($332 after inflation), and the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB is $429, and not even the base model.
AMD is almost just as guilty here with their new RX 9060XT 8GB.
49 Comments
Did you expect the 5060 to have 144 GB of VRAM to match the growth rate?
It’s even worse when we compare to RX 480 also released in 2016 and it was 229$ GPU with 8GB of VRAM, so that’s 0% increase in 9 years.
you forgot we used to have 10 (eg RX 6700 NON-XT) and 12 GB cards (RTX 3060), what we have now is a negative value
Can we stop with the posts meant to just farm karma
There is a huge jump in tech between 2007-2018 I went from a flip phone with no internet to a small hand held computer, but we got to point now all tech slowed down my phone does the same thing my old phone did in 2018 just slightly faster.
Gaming GPUs in 2025 should start with 10GB of VRAM (60 series)
8GB in a new GPU in 2025 is a crime.
Stop buying them.
Too many examples of games using over 8gb to ignore or argue anymore
2244% is wrong 6GB = 6144MB, this is 2400% or +2300%
God I wish mods would start removing this karma farming bullshit from the subreddit.
But to answer your question. I have a 5090. I have a HDR capable 4k monitor.
I haven’t seen more then 16.2gb of VRAM usage in a single game.
Edit: Would also like to mention that 16.2 was a spike in Oblivion Remastered, which is optimized like fucking garbage.
Didn’t the 1080 have 8 gb ram?
Its not even game devs/gamers buying GPU cards anymore its the bitcoin miners, Open AI, Google, X (GROK) basically every company advertising “AI” right now.I mean look at Battlefront 2 and Battlefield series both games were released more than 5 years ago and still their graphics compete with this year’s games. Also partly the devs lazyness to optimize games
The human eye can only see 8GB VRAM.
That card exists to upsell other cards.
As a game developer, you absolutely should continue lol.
Sure, more VRAM is good, but many of the games you’re playing where it’s a problem are so because publishers (always publishers, not devs) wanted to cut corners at your expense.
Sure, NVIDIA is annoying too (especially for us), but it’s mostly publishers. You don’t need 16GB of VRAM of 1080p gaming. You just don’t.
In fact, *all* of the bad things you experience as a gamer are pretty much always the publisher’s fault.
… maybe I’m a little biased.
They’re preying on uninformed people and newcomers, by letting the 16GB have the reviews early and slide in the 8GB for the hype ride.
When game publishing companies (not people working on the game) stop pushing out un optimized slop.
I personally blame deadlines for the state of gaming and company greed. Companies feel the need to push out a AAA title least once a year if not more.
They also want to pay there employees minimal wage and treat them like dogs.
The % are wrong. 256MB -> 6144MB (6GB) is x24 or %2400
Kind of a fallacy to resort to Moore’s Law as something legitimizing the rate of hardware upgrades.
Thing you should also keep in mind….
The Xbox 360 only had 512mb of RAM released around 2005 or so…
Which the first video card is equivalent too..
If the next Witcher game if it decides to use 13GB of video RAM the PlayStation 5 can handle it, because it has a unified memory structure, but a 8GB card released today can’t do it, because PCs don’t have a unified memory structure with video RAM and system RAM.
Are we arguing that greedy corpos are greedy corpos? Dont buy the cards, stop supporting the chain of information. Play older games and forgo new games that take a lot more power to play for a few years. Don’t invest in their stock. There are plenty of ways to get them to step it up, buying isnt one of them.
How long? Until their games start looking much better.
We’ve come to a point where enabling RT makes some games look worse due to ‘optimizing’ them by removing some reflections, shadows or details. AA is often so bad that textures at native resolution look blurrier or grainier than we normally see with upscaling. And other things aren’t really that more realistic, sometimes they look even worse.
I’m actually curious how you got the 2244% number there, shouldn’t it be 2400% (or 2300% ?) since 6GB vram is 24 times the size of 256MB vram? Am I calculating the % incorrectly here?
How about we compare actual performance instead of this stupid VRAM number.
I don’t know, that seems kinda normal for technological leaps. Devs they are just trying to make the new flashy thing “that looks amazing” because we all going nuts when the game has an ultrahd texture pack. No excuse for a lot if not all of their shittier behavior in a lot of fields but thinking that any new generation (generation is a made up classification that they are using for selling us more cards) is gonna be a leap forward, or that any new product it is gonna become a breakthrough… seems kinda naive. It’s just a period of stagnation with no significant advances. They are just trying to inflate share value, and we don’t need to buy everything they put in front of us. Just get what you need and hopefully you can get it at a reasonable price. At the end, it is not my fault, it is not your fault, it is not their fault… it’s everybody’s fault. If that make sense.
Diminishing returns.
You can’t expect to keep any kind of growth to be perpetual, it will eventually plateau and become asymptotic, this already has happened to lots of our tech.
Why do you think all the Stealth fighters look very similar? Or cars, all of very similar profiles, the same with passenger planes, smartphones, etc.?
The amount of VRAM and how Ray tracing wasn’t the quantum leap in graphical quality that rasterization was in the late 1990s… this is a telltale evidence that we are very close to the technological plateau for graphics.
For me, it still falls on the game devs because they need to aware of the hardware that people are using and they CAN optimize their games more, but they don’t care about it.
But it also falls on the GPU companies. I personally just wish that prices were lower. That’s the biggest issue for me. But obviously they want to make money. A $800 computer used to be… a serious computer. Now that’s a “cheap” one. Like you could get a mac for $1,000 or you could get more computing power for less money and build a gaming PC. Now it is almost the opposite other than that macs don’t support enough gaming because Apple is stubborn about doing things the “right way.”
Nvidia flopped hard it’s literally one of the very good reasons to switch to amd if your a gamer. I switched im literally in another dimension now.
On a related note. Ya know what I wanna start seeing from devs? Modular texture/audio packs you opt to download.
I’d like to opt in texture size packs so my storage doesn’t get pegged, because I don’t game with ultra textures on all the time, I’m content with lower texture settings that don’t suck all my vram. Ultra settings compared to high feels like a scam nowadays, negligible difference, so I don’t need my vram to be pegged for nothing.
And for audio too, I want a single language pack, not the whole world collecting dust in my storage.
I miss older generation of games. Dice’s Battlefield 1 and Battlefront 2 still are my games of choice that I think of peak graphic fidelity, games look gorgeous to this day, and yet they ask a measly 4gb vram GPU as recommended, my mind still blown away. ( I know BETTER graphical games have come out, we’re just hitting the point of diminishing returns in terms of graphics, especially since practically everyone is using Megascans for photo realism. Unique Art styles more than ever is crucial to stand out to the public and transcend time, for better or worse. I’m just tired of ultra HD PBR photo realistic graphics pegging my GPU fam.)
For anyone with functioning brain:
https://preview.redd.it/daxf56jw655f1.png?width=1422&format=png&auto=webp&s=8d7ec277a312ed14dcc7ed2d30ef81e5c71623d4
It’s not as simple as vram, bus width, speed and capacity is FAR more important. This is why I never buy below xx90 spec cards, ideally you want the pro series former quadros.
8gig should be an entry level card VRAM in 2025 with $200-250 price tag.
People complained about devs using to much vram? Ive seen complaints of not optimizing. But usually the complaint is gpus are being sold now with enough vram.
“Just enable upscaling”
The worst part is, that vram is not wven expensive. Like we’re talking around 18 dollars per 8GB of GDDR6.
Pcie 5.0 x8??? What the fuck???
Who the fuck blames game devs???? Anybody I’ve seen blames Nvidia and AMD for still pushing 8gb cards in 2025
1gb of vram costs them 3 dollars btw
I‘m the last person to defend Shitvidia, but this slowdown of growth in technology is only natural. We aren‘t in the early 2000s anymore, where the jump was so big that you had to buy a new PC every year. Moore‘s law is dead.
People will buy it anyway.
Juxtaposing VRAM tech in 2007 with VRAM tech in 2025 doesn’t make you prolific. Your wit stops at the threshold where you make it sound like they’re technically similar. You’ve taken the lowest common denominator understanding (“Look, number not go up as much”) and applied it as if those are actually viable comparisons.
They’re not the same tech. They don’t have the same capacities or capabilities of transferring data. They don’t have the same bridge tech.
I’ve yet to cap 16gb of VRAM. Why does this sub have such a hard on for VRAM amount?
Now put the Nvidia stock price next to these numbers, and you will realize why the quality has gone way down and the price way up.
It more or less kept pace with changes to standard system RAM sizes, which similarly rapidly expanded and then plateaued.
seeing as Unreal Engine 5 is currently the cause of most performance issues…. I will blame the devs ;p
It s the display Render the issue not the game Dev. Game Dev do use better quality texture, what could be done with that is use AI to upscale the texture at run time instead of needing more ram?
So you load a 1MB image at 512×512 and upscale it with AI to 10k at the Shader Level inside the GPU. So only the Output render is upscaled quality instead. This might even make game faster and the AI upscaling wouldnt have Ghosting in this case.
OP learns what efficiency and diminishing returns are (June, 2025)
Until it is wrong.
These companies make these gpus because people buy them. If you don’t like it, buy a different GPU. The 7800xt was around $500 at launch and has 16 gigs
We are in a technology plateau
To be fair, the type of ram VRAM is different.
Sure, NVIDIA and AMD are greedy and they could easily put more vram on these cards but Jesus Christ, game devs don’t give the slightest fuck about optimising their games anymore.