The video memory of a video card has become a very big topic in recent weeks (we also devoted a separate article to it). More and more games are making relatively high demands on it, and it’s starting to be said that many of the cards released just don’t have enough capacity anymore. On the latest episode of the Broken Silicon podcast, YouTube channel Moore’s Law is Dead invited a developer working on Unreal Engine 5 as a guest, and appeared here partially anonymously only under the name Dave. The conversation was not only about AI or ray tracing, but also about VRAM.
The interview is very interesting and I recommend listening to it in its entirety. In any case, I would like to point out that according to Dave, the growing requirements for video memory are not caused by poor optimization, they say that creating a game for an 8-gigabyte video card today is so (not only) laborious that it is not. it’s even worth doing it, because the studio doesn’t have many resources and needs to focus on other aspects of development. The resulting situation should be the result of more advanced textures or geometry, as well as other new technologies that take up part of the video memory, such as lighting with Lumen.
The developer assures that the requirements will definitely not decrease, but, on the contrary, will increase. He listed cards with 12GB of VRAM as a minimum for new games, and 16GB would be ideal. After all, current consoles also have 16 GB of memory (although common, it works both as RAM and VRAM), and we are talking about a device on which you can directly optimize the game, which is impossible on a PC due to the huge number of potential combinations of components.
– VRAM usage will increase dramatically.
– It is now very difficult to keep in the buffer of 8 GB.
– More VRAM can greatly improve the look of games that don’t rely on tiled textures.
“Developers have to spend so much time on PCs optimizing them for low-end hardware.— Hardware Unboxed (@HardwareUnboxed) April 4, 2023
Source :Indian TV
