AMD says Radeon GPUs have more for the money
AMD reminds gamers that the Radeon RX 6800 series with 16GB VRAM is now available for less than $599 (the price of the upcoming RTX 4070).
Just hours away from the NVIDIA RTX 4070 reviews, AMD has decided to remind all gamers that memory capacity for modern graphics cards is just as important as performance. The higher the resolution and ‘movie quality textures’ the more likely gamers are to face a problem of memory limitation.
Turns out AMD had seen this coming two years ago when they introduced the Navi 21 GPU lineup with 16GB VRAM. In fact, this number has even been further increased to 20GB and 24GB with the Radeon RX 7900 series. Gamers using Radeon GPUs are safe from high memory requirements, but they may need more patience if they expect full ray tracing or FSR3 in games like Cyberpunk 2077.
Radeon RX recommended GPUs for gaming, Source: AMD
The company is demonstrating how gamers can find large memory buffer useful in modern titles. New games such as Resident Evil 4 or the Last Of Us Part 1 at 4K resolution require a lot of memory. Gamers can see peak memory allocation up to 17.5 GB at 4K resolution and with RT ON.
However, one should remember that allocation does not always mean memory usage. These days, games can adjust texture fidelity depending on the available frame buffer, but there is no doubt gaming at 4K or even 1440p with new titles will almost certainly need a high-end GPU these days with more than 8GB VRAM.
Memory allocation in modern titles at 4K, Source: AMD
Thus far, none of the RTX 40 GPUs released to date had less than 12GB VRAM. This configuration will remain the lowest spec for Ada Lovelace architecture even with the arrival of RTX 4070 non-Ti later this week. However, rumors already point towards RTX 4060 series with 8GB VRAM.
Gamers on a budget may also face a similar problem with Radeon RX 7700/7600 mobile series, which are limited to 8GB VRAM as well. Unfortunately, AMD has been quiet about its plans for Navi 32/33 desktop GPUs. But with such memory-oriented marketing, it would be surprising if these upcoming cards were not pushing the industry forward with even higher VRAM capacity from last gen.
Source: AMD
