How much VRAM should you look for in a graphics card?

Growing demand for AI infrastructure has spent the year depleting the world’s memory supply, leaving gamers behind and forcing those who want to upgrade their hardware to pay massive bills. Graphics cards are caught in the same memory shortage that has driven up RAM and SSD prices, with AI data centers gobbling up capacity that would otherwise become GDDR.

Higher capacity cards are hit the hardest, with AMD now charging card partners $10 more for every 8GB of VRAM on a card. With VRAM prices expected to continue to rise, you may want to get a new card now and wait a while. If possible, you should aim for 16GB at a minimum to last the next five years or so and extend your upgrade window.

NVIDIA sells the RTX 5060 Ti in 8GB and 16GB versions that share the same chip, core count, and clock speeds. Tom’s material tested both across 21 games and found the 8GB card 2.3 percent slower on average at 1080p medium settings, which increased to 12 percent at the ultra preset. It also revealed that minimum frame rates were 16% lower, while ray-traced games lagged even further. All things being equal, the deficit comes down to memory capacity.

Test by Unpacked equipment found even bigger performance issues with The Last of Us Part IIwhich ran at 67 frames per second on the 8GB card at very high 1080p, compared to 109 on the 16GB version. It claims that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, released in 2024, crashed at 1080p on ultra settings. When a game needs more memory than a card can offer, it begins to swap resources over the PCIe bus. This causes issues like stuttering, laggy or low-resolution textures, and sometimes a game that doesn’t work at all.

The resolution you play at is the main factor to consider with VRAM. 8GB is still enough for most games at 1080p at medium and high settings, including esports titles and older versions. Meanwhile, 12GB should be fine for 1440p gaming in most cases, or will give you even more headroom for high settings at 1080p. 16GB is the minimum for 4K and is currently the most scalable option.

PC gamer ran some tests earlier this year and found that the 8GB cards managed decent frame rates at 1080p, while the 16GB versions performed faster and with a wider margin. It’s only when you increase the quality with options like ultra texture settings and ray tracing that performance issues start to appear.

Naturally, card and memory makers are doing their best to take advantage of the AI ​​boom. Tom’s material said last December that AMD had increased the price of GPU and memory kits by $10 for every 8GB. This was followed by additional percentage-based price increases, and potentially more in the future.

As for memory makers like Samsung, SK hynix and Micron (which discontinued its Crucial gaming brand late last year), they make a lot more money selling high-bandwidth memory to AI data centers. There’s simply no incentive for them to sell GDDR6 and GDDR7 to graphics card manufacturers, which means that budget 16GB cards are increasingly difficult to find at reasonable prices.

NVIDIA is there too. It reduced production of the 16GB RTX 5060 Ti and RTX 5070 Ti so it could prioritize 8GB models for mainstream GeForce supply, according to a report from VideoCardz. These cards obviously use half as much memory, which makes it possible to continue to develop them in volume and sell them at a fairly reasonable price. It’s the same logic behind the changes to Valve’s Steam Deck lineup this year.

Current 8GB cards will be able to handle most titles at 1080p for a while, but games will continue to be designed for the growing number of people with more VRAM in their cards, and the settings you can run on 8GB will decrease every year. Conversely, the extra cost of 12GB or 16GB should see you through at least the next five years – the RTX 3060, released in 2021, is still the most common GPU on Steam at 3.76% of systems. Now may be a good time to buy, as prices are expected to continue to rise.