2021 Edit:
Stop making threads or comments with false data. Please back up claims with this tool.
IMPORTANT EDIT: MSI Afterburner now has a way to display "Per Process VRAM Commit", which I refer to in this article as "VRAM Usage"
Please see https://www.resetera.com/threads/msi-afterburner-can-now-display-per-process-vram.291986/ for details of how to enable this feature.
Part 1: Historical evidence of consoles vs PC VRAM requirements
Historically, PC requirements have been at least semi-dictated by the games being created on consoles.
I do believe we will still see Ultra Texture packs on PC that push further than consoles, and mods too will always push boundaries, but establishing where the consoles will be at is critical to understand what pushing further really means.
For simplification I will be referring to the shared system memory in XO/XSX and PS4/PS5 as VRAM, just remember that under this system, both the CPU and GPU must share it.
First we must put things into context. The jump between PS3 and PS4 was 256mb to 8GB. 32x increase in VRAM!
The main reason that early gen GPU's such as the 780 could not keep up for the entire 7 years, was that 8GB of VRAM was absolutely insane for 2013 when the PS4 was released. In fact this was a surprise to almost everyone.
PS4 came out Nov 2013 with an unprecedented 8GB of VRAM, with 3GB allocated to the OS, and 5GB available to developers. This was then split between CPU and GPU as the developers chose. Using this metric, we went from 256MB to 5GB, a 20x increase.
The jump between PS4/XO and PS5/XSX is 8GB to 16GB, 2x increase.
Let's get even more specific. The 8GB in Xbox One is also shared, in fact we know that Xbox One has 3GB reserved for OS and 5GB for the rest of the system.
The XSX has 13.5GB of VRAM to allocate to games, and must share this amount with the CPU. Also only 10GB of the XSX's VRAM has the faster bandwidth of 560GB/s, the other 3.5 GB runs at 336 GB/s. Developers will not likely be allocating more than 10GB to the GPU, otherwise they run into a bandwidth penalty.
Using 13.5GB, we now have a 2.7x VRAM generational increase.
What were PC's up to during this time?
Nvidia's flagship Geforce 780 was released in May 2013, with 3GB of VRAM. In Nov. 2013, AMD released the AMD Radeon R290 with 4GB of VRAM. It wasn't until nearly a year later that Nvidia's Geforce 980 was released, in September 2014, with a more comfortable 4GB of VRAM that held its own without issue for many years at 1080p.
Over the 7 year PS4/XO generation, Nvidia went from 3GB on the 780 to 10GB on the 3080, a 3.33x increase.
Remember, PS3 to PS4 was a 20x generational jump compared to the 2.7x generational jump from XO to XSX.
I'm using these comparisons because X360 had the weird thing with ESRAM, and I currently do not know how much of the PS5 VRAM is reserved for the OS, but I believe we can expect similar numbers.
Screen resolution from PS3 to PS4 was an increase from 720p -> 1080p, a 2.25x jump, and PS4 to PS5 is going from 1080p to 2160p, a 4x jump. More VRAM is being used due to the massive resolution increase, and not just texture quality. Yet we are only getting a 2.7x increase in VRAM for consoles? What gives?
The answer is found in I/O.
So, we have only a 2.7x increase in VRAM because of how the I/O improvement changes the paradigm of how developers utilize memory for next-gen.
We recently learned that this same amazing I/O revolution, will also be enabled on the RTX 30 series.
For those of us who pair an NVME SSD with a 30 series GPU, VRAM isn't going to be a limiting factor in performance thanks to technologies such as DirectStorage and RTX I/O and Sampler Feedback Streaming. See the end of this post for links to articles that go into more detail of what these technologies do.
Part 2: Establishing why people are concerned
There is currently a very large misconception that runs through the PC gaming community.
Many people currently believe that the games they are playing today are using more VRAM than they actually are. This has people worried that since they see that games are already using 8-11GB of VRAM, there is no possible way that this could be enough for Next-gen, even if we consider I/O improvements.
Luckily, people are mistaken.
A long, long, time ago, us old folks used a program called FRAPS, to measure our framerate in games. FRAPS has now been abandonware for almost 8 years, and even before then, almost everyone had migrated to using a program called Rivatuner Statistics Server. RTSS has been the premiere choice of software to display your FPS and other statistics for over a decade. But there is an inherent issue with RTSS, and almost every single other monitoring program on your computer, from GPU-Z, to EVGA Precision, to even HWiNFO64. All of these tools report "Allocated VRAM", which is not the same as "VRAM Usage", thus why we see a number that is far higher than the reality.
Brandon Bell has been with Nvidia since 2010, and is a Senior Technical Marketing Manager at Nvidia, and helps write Nvidia's architecture whitepapers.
This was answered by Justin Walker, who has been with Nvidia since 2005, and is a product manager for GeForce desktop GPUs.
So how do we find how much VRAM our games are actually using if our current tools are misleading us?
If you want to see the accurate amount of VRAM in use, not just allocated, you need to either use a built in monitoring overlay, such as those found in Doom Eternal or Flight Simulator 2020, or for games that do not offer their own real-time monitors you can use Special K which uses memory budgets to report VRAM.
I've included an example of how these tools report different numbers. This is using a 980 Ti, which has 6GB of VRAM, in the Game Pass version of Flight Simulator 2020.
In this example, the first number is from the FS2020 developer overlay, and is reporting 2426 MB in use.
The 2nd number is from the Special K GPU Widget, and is reporting a rolling average of 2426.4 MB in use.
The 3rd number is the one most people recognize, and is the VRAM that is currently allocated, 5926 MB.
In this example, the reported # that everyone uses, is off by 2.45x!
Part 3: But what does it mean?!
We have now established that current PC games are actually using less VRAM than we think, and thanks to improvements in the near future like RTX I/O and Sampler Feedback Streaming our VRAM will go even further.
I am extremely confident you will still be able to play any game with Ultra-max textures in 4k on a 3080 10GB for the next 2 years, until Nvidia Hopper is scheduled to come out, and I am very confident you will still be able to do this in 2024, when the next-next GPUs are expected to be released.
For the people who use VRAM for things other than gaming, or for those who are worried about keeping their GPU beyond 4 years, or for those who are still distressed by the VRAM amount despite the evidence before them, Nvidia does have a product for you: the 3080 20GB, or the 3090.
For the rest of us (many who are not even gaming at 4k right now, but lower resolutions such as 1440p or 1080p), the 3080 10GB will not be holding us back.
If you actually made it this far without skipping to the end, I truly thank you for spending your time reading this, and I hope it has been enlightening.
Supplemental Reading:
Sampler Feedback Streaming: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dire...edback-some-useful-once-hidden-data-unlocked/
DirectStorage: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-coming-to-pc/
RTX I/O: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-io-gpu-accelerated-storage-technology/
NVIDIA Community Q/A: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-30-series-community-qa/
Guide to Special K: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Special_K
Edit v1.1: Minor typo and grammatical corrections. Enhanced layout. Added conclusion to part 3.
Edit v1.2: Added sentence about calling console system memory, vram.
Edit v1.3: 2.45x is not 245%. My bad.
Edit v2: Updated with new information about MSI Afterburner Beta
Edit v2.1: How do I pin this picture at the top of every PC gaming Resetera thread?
Stop making threads or comments with false data. Please back up claims with this tool.
IMPORTANT EDIT: MSI Afterburner now has a way to display "Per Process VRAM Commit", which I refer to in this article as "VRAM Usage"
Please see https://www.resetera.com/threads/msi-afterburner-can-now-display-per-process-vram.291986/ for details of how to enable this feature.
Part 1: Historical evidence of consoles vs PC VRAM requirements
Historically, PC requirements have been at least semi-dictated by the games being created on consoles.
I do believe we will still see Ultra Texture packs on PC that push further than consoles, and mods too will always push boundaries, but establishing where the consoles will be at is critical to understand what pushing further really means.
For simplification I will be referring to the shared system memory in XO/XSX and PS4/PS5 as VRAM, just remember that under this system, both the CPU and GPU must share it.
First we must put things into context. The jump between PS3 and PS4 was 256mb to 8GB. 32x increase in VRAM!
The main reason that early gen GPU's such as the 780 could not keep up for the entire 7 years, was that 8GB of VRAM was absolutely insane for 2013 when the PS4 was released. In fact this was a surprise to almost everyone.
Taken from https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df-hardware-spec-analysis-playstation-4
PS4 came out Nov 2013 with an unprecedented 8GB of VRAM, with 3GB allocated to the OS, and 5GB available to developers. This was then split between CPU and GPU as the developers chose. Using this metric, we went from 256MB to 5GB, a 20x increase.
The jump between PS4/XO and PS5/XSX is 8GB to 16GB, 2x increase.
Let's get even more specific. The 8GB in Xbox One is also shared, in fact we know that Xbox One has 3GB reserved for OS and 5GB for the rest of the system.
The XSX has 13.5GB of VRAM to allocate to games, and must share this amount with the CPU. Also only 10GB of the XSX's VRAM has the faster bandwidth of 560GB/s, the other 3.5 GB runs at 336 GB/s. Developers will not likely be allocating more than 10GB to the GPU, otherwise they run into a bandwidth penalty.
Using 13.5GB, we now have a 2.7x VRAM generational increase.
What were PC's up to during this time?
Nvidia's flagship Geforce 780 was released in May 2013, with 3GB of VRAM. In Nov. 2013, AMD released the AMD Radeon R290 with 4GB of VRAM. It wasn't until nearly a year later that Nvidia's Geforce 980 was released, in September 2014, with a more comfortable 4GB of VRAM that held its own without issue for many years at 1080p.
Over the 7 year PS4/XO generation, Nvidia went from 3GB on the 780 to 10GB on the 3080, a 3.33x increase.
Remember, PS3 to PS4 was a 20x generational jump compared to the 2.7x generational jump from XO to XSX.
I'm using these comparisons because X360 had the weird thing with ESRAM, and I currently do not know how much of the PS5 VRAM is reserved for the OS, but I believe we can expect similar numbers.
Screen resolution from PS3 to PS4 was an increase from 720p -> 1080p, a 2.25x jump, and PS4 to PS5 is going from 1080p to 2160p, a 4x jump. More VRAM is being used due to the massive resolution increase, and not just texture quality. Yet we are only getting a 2.7x increase in VRAM for consoles? What gives?
The answer is found in I/O.
Excerpt from https://www.tweaktown.com/news/7134...ep-dive-into-next-gen-storage-tech/index.html, which was an analysis of the Mark Cerny video "Road to PS5"
So, we have only a 2.7x increase in VRAM because of how the I/O improvement changes the paradigm of how developers utilize memory for next-gen.
We recently learned that this same amazing I/O revolution, will also be enabled on the RTX 30 series.
For those of us who pair an NVME SSD with a 30 series GPU, VRAM isn't going to be a limiting factor in performance thanks to technologies such as DirectStorage and RTX I/O and Sampler Feedback Streaming. See the end of this post for links to articles that go into more detail of what these technologies do.
- Conclusion of Part 1: 10GB of VRAM in 2021+ is not the same as 10GB of VRAM in 2020.
Part 2: Establishing why people are concerned
There is currently a very large misconception that runs through the PC gaming community.
Many people currently believe that the games they are playing today are using more VRAM than they actually are. This has people worried that since they see that games are already using 8-11GB of VRAM, there is no possible way that this could be enough for Next-gen, even if we consider I/O improvements.
Luckily, people are mistaken.
A long, long, time ago, us old folks used a program called FRAPS, to measure our framerate in games. FRAPS has now been abandonware for almost 8 years, and even before then, almost everyone had migrated to using a program called Rivatuner Statistics Server. RTSS has been the premiere choice of software to display your FPS and other statistics for over a decade. But there is an inherent issue with RTSS, and almost every single other monitoring program on your computer, from GPU-Z, to EVGA Precision, to even HWiNFO64. All of these tools report "Allocated VRAM", which is not the same as "VRAM Usage", thus why we see a number that is far higher than the reality.
Excerpt from https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/...y-x-faces-off-with-nvidias-gtx-980-ti-titan-x
Brandon Bell has been with Nvidia since 2010, and is a Senior Technical Marketing Manager at Nvidia, and helps write Nvidia's architecture whitepapers.
Excerpt from https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-30-series-community-qa/
This was answered by Justin Walker, who has been with Nvidia since 2005, and is a product manager for GeForce desktop GPUs.
So how do we find how much VRAM our games are actually using if our current tools are misleading us?
If you want to see the accurate amount of VRAM in use, not just allocated, you need to either use a built in monitoring overlay, such as those found in Doom Eternal or Flight Simulator 2020, or for games that do not offer their own real-time monitors you can use Special K which uses memory budgets to report VRAM.
I've included an example of how these tools report different numbers. This is using a 980 Ti, which has 6GB of VRAM, in the Game Pass version of Flight Simulator 2020.
In this example, the first number is from the FS2020 developer overlay, and is reporting 2426 MB in use.
The 2nd number is from the Special K GPU Widget, and is reporting a rolling average of 2426.4 MB in use.
The 3rd number is the one most people recognize, and is the VRAM that is currently allocated, 5926 MB.
In this example, the reported # that everyone uses, is off by 2.45x!
- Conclusion of Part 2: Actual VRAM usage in PC games is far less than believed, thanks to misleading software.
Part 3: But what does it mean?!
We have now established that current PC games are actually using less VRAM than we think, and thanks to improvements in the near future like RTX I/O and Sampler Feedback Streaming our VRAM will go even further.
I am extremely confident you will still be able to play any game with Ultra-max textures in 4k on a 3080 10GB for the next 2 years, until Nvidia Hopper is scheduled to come out, and I am very confident you will still be able to do this in 2024, when the next-next GPUs are expected to be released.
For the people who use VRAM for things other than gaming, or for those who are worried about keeping their GPU beyond 4 years, or for those who are still distressed by the VRAM amount despite the evidence before them, Nvidia does have a product for you: the 3080 20GB, or the 3090.
For the rest of us (many who are not even gaming at 4k right now, but lower resolutions such as 1440p or 1080p), the 3080 10GB will not be holding us back.
- Conclusion of Part 3: 10GB is enough (for now)
If you actually made it this far without skipping to the end, I truly thank you for spending your time reading this, and I hope it has been enlightening.
Supplemental Reading:
Sampler Feedback Streaming: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dire...edback-some-useful-once-hidden-data-unlocked/
DirectStorage: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-coming-to-pc/
RTX I/O: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-io-gpu-accelerated-storage-technology/
NVIDIA Community Q/A: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-30-series-community-qa/
Guide to Special K: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Special_K
Edit v1.1: Minor typo and grammatical corrections. Enhanced layout. Added conclusion to part 3.
Edit v1.2: Added sentence about calling console system memory, vram.
Edit v1.3: 2.45x is not 245%. My bad.
Edit v2: Updated with new information about MSI Afterburner Beta
Edit v2.1: How do I pin this picture at the top of every PC gaming Resetera thread?
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