1y ago

How far does 4GB of VRAM get you nowadays?

Recently I've finally built something that I could consider 'decent', 10th gen i5 and 16GB of DDR4 but what aggravates me the most is that I could only attain an RX 570 4GB within my extremely tight budget, how much can I get out of said cards nowadays? Specially given how stupidly high PC game requirements are nowadays. I play at 1080p, not even 2K.

I have a dripfeed of an income so it can be very difficult for me to even upgrade a storage device.

12 comments

On 1080p I would say it would be fine? Just don't expect to play everything maxed out.
- This. What primarily uses up the space is:
  textures (twice the size, four times the storage) and having a colour / bump / reflectivity / emmisivity / diffusivity / &c texture for every surface
  shadow maps - (most) lights have a high-resolution texture associated with them, see how far they 'shine' in every direction before they hit something. Modern games have a lot of lights
  Turn down texture and shadow quality, watch your GPU RAM usage drop right off.
  
  Don't expect to play everything maxed out
  Nah, my aim has always been smooth/high framerates over "ultra" settings so I don't have worries aboht that sort of thing.
  shadow maps
  This I didn't know, I thought that textures were the main thing that really made GPUs choke nowadays, given how devs are obsessed with things like 8K textures and whatnot.
  Still, good to see that I didn't buy an useless card for today's gaming, or at least I think so, I run Gundam Battle Operation 2 perfectly fine and stable so far.
- I guess it depends on what kind of games they're gonna play, too. I think for Indies, non triple-A and older games this PC will do just fine. The thing with PC gaming nowadays is that there are so many choices, not everything is triple-A cutting edge games.

This f

I game on an Nvidia GTX 970ti and it still keeps chugging along. As long as you are merely trying to get games to run, not necessarily on high settings, you can get most games to work. Sometimes you need to make some sacrifices in terms of performance.

Digital Foundry has a really good video on PC settings: https://youtu.be/A8VrFUi79yo
They also have really good videos on… well, just about everything. Sometimes they have optimized settings for games as a good starting point.

also i5, but 9th gen - 32gb ddr4. previous gpu was a 970, now I use a 1650, both 4gb vram. havent had any issues myself, though I do need to decrease some gfx settings occasionally to improve performance.

4gb is going to be tight, if it's possible to find a 580 for a decent price, I'd do that instead

As someone that just came from an R9 380 2GB, further than me for sure. It made it about as far as No Man's Sky before it started really working hard. I got lucky and ran across the money I needed to upgrade but I was miserable trying to play anything there for awhile.

I had a 980 FE and it was begging for mercy, you can get good frames on 1080p, low settings, if your card has good cooler, so it won't turn into a grilling pan. But i would suggest upgrading even with a second hand part (i got myself a second hand palit 3070 jet stream, it is a trooper, but the cooler can't keep up with the heat at times.) so yeah, that's that.
I should add games like csgo, fortnite, rainbow, gta v, rdr2, skyrim runs fine on a 4gb but still...

12 comments