Both games were developed for multiple platforms (Windows PC, Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360), although the former appeared on the PS4 and Xbox One a little after the game launched, and Last Light was remastered in the following year for the PC and newer consoles. To see how much VRAM these games were using, let's examine two of those titles: Black Flag and Last Light. A really good monitor for gaming might have had a resolution of 2560 x 1600, but the majority were 1080p – the bare minimum, these days, but perfectly acceptable for that period. The fastest graphics cards money could buy you were AMD's Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition and Nvidia's GeForce GTX Titan, with 3 and 6 GB of VRAM apiece, and price tags of $499 and $999 respectively. To understand why it's so much, we need to understand exactly what the RAM is being used for, and for that, let's take a look at how the best graphics were created when 3 GB of VRAM was the norm.īack in 2013, PC gamers were treated to some truly outstanding graphics – Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Battlefield 4 (below), BioShock Infinite, Metro: Last Light, and Tomb Raider all showed what could be achieved through technology, artistic design, and a lot of coding know-how. Naturally, you'd expect an increase after a decade, but it's a substantial leap. Today, 24 GB is the highest amount of VRAM available, and there are plenty of models with 12 or 16 GB, though 8 GB is far more common. No shortage of cache and RAM on these graphics cards Ten years ago, the most expensive desktop graphics cards housed 6 GB of VRAM on its circuit board, although the majority of GPUs came with just 2 or 3 GB. This is similar to the main system memory but is specialized for graphics workloads. There's far too much data to store all of it in the cache, so the rest is kept in the next best thing – video memory or VRAM. cache), but this is only large enough to store the information for the calculations taking place at any given moment. All GPUs have small amounts of high-speed memory built into them (a.k.a. In the case of data, it needs to be stored as close to the graphics processor as possible. We can summarize it all by simply stating that 3D graphics is 'just' a lot of math and data handling. We've covered this before in a series of articles, so if you're not sure about some of the terms, feel free to check them out. Games, graphics, and gigabytesīefore we delve into our analysis of graphics, games, and VRAM, it might be worth your time to quickly review the basics of how 3D rendering is typically done. So, are games really using that amount of memory, and if so, what exactly is it about the inner workings of these titles that require so much? Let's lift the hood of modern 3D rendering and take a look at what's really happening within these graphics engines. AMD has also been emphasizing that its cards boast significantly more RAM than Nvidia's, and the latter's newest models have been criticized for having only 12 GB. We've seen indications that 8GB may not be sufficient for the latest games, especially when played at high resolutions and with graphics quality set to high or maximum. Even if you're just a casual follower of tech news, you can't have missed that the amount of video memory (VRAM) on a graphics card is a hot topic right now.
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