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QOTW: How much RAM must your next graphics card have?

by Parm Mann on 24 April 2015, 16:30

Tags: NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), AMD (NYSE:AMD)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qacqxe

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Much has been made of graphics-card memory in recent months, with Nvidia fuelling the debate with current-gen releases.

The GTX 970's 4GB frame buffer wasn't quite what it seemed, the GTX 960's 2GB of memory fed via a 128-bit bus was deemed a limitation on a modern mid-range card, and then there's the GTX Titan X, whose lavish 12GB frame buffer has been described as an excuse to jack the overall price. And AMD's adding a wrinkle to the mix with the upcoming introduction of HBM.

The engineers behind such products might be thinking you just can't win, and it's an interesting topic in more ways than one. Our own benchmarks have shown that few games fully saturate the 4GB buffer on many of today's high-end cards, however future usage scenarios - particularly virtual reality - suggest that memory bandwidth rather than compute capability is going to be the most obvious bottleneck. But will greater amounts of memory truly enable us to do more, or will it contribute to lazy development?

Plenty of food for thought, so let's open up the debate to all our knowledgeable readers. Looking ahead at your next graphics card upgrade, what will you deem to be the minimum amount of onboard memory needed in order for you to make a purchase?

Let us know your thoughts, and your reasons, using the comments facility below.



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HEXUS Forums :: 68 Comments

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I would say AMD's next top gen card will be 8GB of the HBM to sell it as a 4K card. Nvidia will prob stick with 8GB too. All new mid range cards next year should come with 4GB. I'm not saying that will be true, just the way I think it should be.
In order to allow for Crossfire or SLI on multi-monitors I would prefer 4GB, but the next card I buy will probably be to crossfire with my current R9 280 and therefore only 3GB (I gave up my 4GB GTX760 so my son could go SLI).
4GB is my minimal, not 3.3-3.5 that I received with the GTX 970, but with HBM on the horizon that could changed depending on developers utilization of HBM. I will upgrade to the 390/390x more than likely and I'll feel conformable with it for 3 years.
Nvidia Pascal should have a mim of 6GB! Thou Nvidia have said pascal could have upto 32GB of 3D stacked RAM http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/03/17/pascal/ - that would be more for professional Card rather than consumer card I would have to say Mim 6GB - Max 12GB.

Not sure what NVLINK is and wither this will require new motherboards to feature this.
6/8/12GB depending on cost/performance balance (ideally a titan x or 980ti if/when released). But then I don't use it purely for gaming, I use it for 3D rendering so the extra ram is used for gpu rendering etc :)