8 GB GPUs still have a place in the market but they are no longer enough for 1080p gaming in 2025

[Redaktion]

In a recent X post, AMD's Frank Azor argued that gamers who play at 1080p don't need more than 8 GB VRAM. However, that statement is not entirely correct, and while there is a market for 8 GB GPUs, they should be far cheaper than the entry-level Radeon RX 9060 XT variant.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/8-GB-GPUs-still-have-a-place-in-the-market-but-they-are-no-longer-enough-for-1080p-gaming-in-2025.1023149.0.html

[Worgarthe]

I honestly couldn't bother to read much of the article of such premise simply because of the title; how does it suddenly become "no longer enough in 2025"? Like what, it turns to 2025 on the calendar and it's immediately not enough or what? Or you mean if one wants to play 95-99% of boring trash generic AAA games released in 2025?

And if you actually pay attention to the mentioned Steam you will see that on the list of the most played games, first 100, really not many of them require wild graphical power or VRAM past 8 GB because majority of people enjoy - shocker, shocker - massively replayable games or multiplayer titles such as the mentioned CS2, and Apex, or The Finals, DOTA, Age of Empires 2 DE etc., over some bland soulless junk like Senua's Saga 2 that quickly gets forgotten after its release.

But hey, if one really wants to be "in trend" and play modern predictable boring stuff which visually looks worse than games from 5-8 years ago while requiring 10x GPU power - so be it. Sheep's gonna sheep, that's how OEMs are making money after all.

[Peculiar]

The finals is actually a pretty interesting case study now that you mention it. It's a fairly modern UE5 game yet even at 4k only requires something like 6GB vram. I wonder how they're managing to achieve that.

And it achieves fairly high fps even on relatively old weaker gpus. If all switch 2 games can be as well optimised as this, it has good days ahead of it.

[Vizz]

I kind of agree that 8GB is often too little for modern games, but in the other hand there are like many many thousands of great games on PC that run fine with 8Gb VRAM and don't cost upwards of 50 euros anymore.

I had a pc with a 6GB 980ti up till a few months ago and I still had way more games that ran fine on my pc than I had time to play (even if I didn't have a job and a family)

If you get a PlayStation pro, sure it's cheaper than a decent PC, but there aren't nearly as many games available, some genres are hardly available at all, the games are way way more expensive and the newest games don't look nearly as good as they do on a good pc.

[opckieran]

I honestly couldn't bother to read much of the article of such premise simply because of the title; how does it suddenly become "no longer enough in 2025"? Like what, it turns to 2025 on the calendar and it's immediately not enough of what? Or you mean if one wants to play 95-99% of boring trash generic AAA games released in 2025?

And if you actually pay attention to the mentioned Steam you will see that on the list of the most played games, first 100, really not many of them require wild graphical power or VRAM past 8 GB because majority of people enjoy - shocker, shocker - massively replayable games or multiplayer titles (such as the mentioned CS2, Apex etc.) or The Finals, DOTA, Age of Empires 2 DE etc., over some bland soulless junk like Senua's Saga 2 that quickly gets forgotten after its release.

But hey, if one really wants to be "in trend" and play modern predictable boring stuff which visually looks worse than games from 5-8 years ago while requiring 10x GPU power - so be it. Sheep's gonna sheep, that's how OEMs are making money after all.

I'm convinced at this point that reviewers' and now gamers' cry for more VRAM is owed to a successful psyop by GPU manufacturers working with today's AAA publishers to convince the masses to spend oodles of money on hardware to make the thought of spending $80 on today's woke forgettable/garbage games (then more on DLC!) sting less. Gotta get the most out of the additional $400-1700 you already spent on a beefed-up gaming subsystem after all!

[gofashlosecash]

I honestly couldn't bother to read much of the article of such premise simply because of the title; how does it suddenly become "no longer enough in 2025"? Like what, it turns to 2025 on the calendar and it's immediately not enough of what? Or you mean if one wants to play 95-99% of boring trash generic AAA games released in 2025?

And if you actually pay attention to the mentioned Steam you will see that on the list of the most played games, first 100, really not many of them require wild graphical power or VRAM past 8 GB because majority of people enjoy - shocker, shocker - massively replayable games or multiplayer titles (such as the mentioned CS2, Apex etc.) or The Finals, DOTA, Age of Empires 2 DE etc., over some bland soulless junk like Senua's Saga 2 that quickly gets forgotten after its release.

But hey, if one really wants to be "in trend" and play modern predictable boring stuff which visually looks worse than games from 5-8 years ago while requiring 10x GPU power - so be it. Sheep's gonna sheep, that's how OEMs are making money after all.

I'm convinced at this point that reviewers' and now gamers' cry for more VRAM is owed to a successful psyop by GPU manufacturers working with today's AAA publishers to convince the masses to spend oodles of money on hardware to make the thought of spending $80 on today's woke forgettable/garbage games (then more on DLC!) sting less. Gotta get the most out of the additional $400-1700 you already spent on a beefed-up gaming subsystem after all!

is woke in the room with us now? absolutely nothing about AAA games being boring has anything to do with that but your politics obsessed brain had to bring that into this conversation because woke lives rent free in your bigoted brain. the vast majority of AAA games are just games with zero commentary on what losers deem "political" (literally anyone black or gay simply EXISTING in games) and they are boring because it caters to the same terminally online and ignorant basement dwellers who needs another military shoot em up game or Unreal Engine 5 showcase extravaganza. it's actually the opposite of woke, the boring games have been catering to the same sweaty in celebration crowd for decades and people are more or less over it.

[Alpha_Lyrae]

8GB is plenty for 1080p unless you want high-resolution mip-maps for distant viewing and high-res textures. Game engine texture streamer is also responsible for memory management, so if it's eating VRAM at upscaled 1080p (=720p in quality mode), there's a big issue there.

Typically, you wouldn't want to use path tracing on these lower tier GPUs anyway as you're not likely to hit 60fps to make framegen worth it. 30fps + FG to 60fps has worse latency than normal 30fps. BVH structure is stored in VRAM, and yes, this can eat quite a bit of memory depending on the complexity of the BVH structure. But again, if the performance isn't there, it's not worth it.

PC games have innumerable options to make a game playable with 8GB. Use them.

[A]

I'm convinced at this point that reviewers' and now gamers' cry for more VRAM is owed to a successful psyop by GPU manufacturers working with today's AAA publishers to convince the masses to spend oodles of money on hardware to make the thought of spending $80 on today's woke forgettable/garbage games (then more on DLC!) sting less. Gotta get the most out of the additional $400-1700 you already spent on a beefed-up gaming subsystem after all!

I think at issue here is around 10 years ago, you could get a top mid range gpu for $250 with 8gb ram. Now 10 years later, a low mid end gpu cost $300 with 8gb ram. Of course inflation has a part to do with it plus the jump in price due to crypto and AI. So people feel like stuff has stagnated.

But GPU companies have on purpose kept VRAM usage low to upsell higher VRAM models or complete upgrades in tiers due to AI as that is the biggest cash cow now. And gamers are just paying the price of the artificial stagnation.

[GeorgeS]

I'm convinced at this point that reviewers' and now gamers' cry for more VRAM is owed to a successful psyop by GPU manufacturers working with today's AAA publishers to convince the masses to spend oodles of money on hardware to make the thought of spending $80 on today's woke forgettable/garbage games (then more on DLC!) sting less. Gotta get the most out of the additional $400-1700 you already spent on a beefed-up gaming subsystem after all!

I think at issue here is around 10 years ago, you could get a top mid range gpu for $250 with 8gb ram. Now 10 years later, a low mid end gpu cost $300 with 8gb ram. Of course inflation has a part to do with it plus the jump in price due to crypto and AI. So people feel like stuff has stagnated.

But GPU companies have on purpose kept VRAM usage low to upsell higher VRAM models or complete upgrades in tiers due to AI as that is the biggest cash cow now. And gamers are just paying the price of the artificial stagnation.

I'd guess we ALL need to forget the Handheld folks if surely not most all Laptop folks where >=8GB VRAM may or not be available anywhere. :)

Surely the authors and supporters are drunk on Capitalistic Kool-Aid where in more is always better as GPU OEM's 'scale' their offerings to up sell the higher end models that have more profitable margins. :)

Given that even in 2025 just about EVERYTHING can be ran on <= GTX1060 the industry press's job is to convince users/gamer's to purchase NEW hardware as 'consumerism' pays the bills and drives %90 of the worlds economies. :)
 

[A]

I'd guess we ALL need to forget the Handheld folks if surely not most all Laptop folks where >=8GB VRAM may or not be available anywhere. :)

Surely the authors and supporters are drunk on Capitalistic Kool-Aid where in more is always better as GPU OEM's 'scale' their offerings to up sell the higher end models that have more profitable margins. :)

Given that even in 2025 just about EVERYTHING can be ran on <= GTX1060 the industry press's job is to convince users/gamer's to purchase NEW hardware as 'consumerism' pays the bills and drives %90 of the worlds economies. :)

I myself game on a laptop with 4gb VRAM 1660 TI (which is about 8% better than a 1060 desktop) so I am more than aware. This laptop was able to last so long precisely because most top end has been aiming at 4k gaming. So at 1080p I had mostly no problems. These days I scrap by at lowest settings on 1080p with everything turned off. I almost his a bottleneck with FF7 which required 6gb vram, but thanks to community patches it is possible to play it with 4gb vram.

The only reason it lasted this long is in part due to top end gaming aiming at 4k. This let those of us gaming at 1080p last much longer than usual. But its already reaching its limits and I definitely wouldn't but a new pc with this kind of performance. You definitely need much better if you want to play top quality in 1080p.

And I imagine as AI starts making into games (making games more dynamic), the requirements are going to jump for the upper end games. In both processing power and especially vram. You can't get around that by sticking to 1080p.

PS Don't handhelds do upscaling?

[GeorgeS]

I myself game on a laptop with 4gb VRAM 1660 TI (which is about 8% better than a 1060 desktop) so I am more than aware. This laptop was able to last so long precisely because most top end has been aiming at 4k gaming. So at 1080p I had mostly no problems. These days I scrap by at lowest settings on 1080p with everything turned off. I almost his a bottleneck with FF7 which required 6gb vram, but thanks to community patches it is possible to play it with 4gb vram.

The only reason it lasted this long is in part due to top end gaming aiming at 4k. This let those of us gaming at 1080p last much longer than usual. But its already reaching its limits and I definitely wouldn't but a new pc with this kind of performance. You definitely need much better if you want to play top quality in 1080p.

And I imagine as AI starts making into games (making games more dynamic), the requirements are going to jump for the upper end games. In both processing power and especially vram. You can't get around that by sticking to 1080p.

PS Don't handhelds do upscaling?

Desktops, Laptops AND Handhelds can do upscaling. :)

So as always, the general 'rule of thumb' is turn the details down and/or reduce resolution.

While some developers/publishers are able to scale their games better than others that is not so say that some titles are pure poorly optimized Bloatware if it is requiring modern/high end hardware @ 1080P.

Then again, if your looking for top-of-the-line all settings Maxed 1440P/2160P by all means toss as much hardware as you can afford at it!!!

However at a mere 1080P IF you don't require anything near best in class visuals, by all means dig out every trick in the book to get the game spitting out usable FPS to game with. :)

Lack of >8GB of VRAM is simply NOT the limitation here. (as the article attempts to claim)