It’s the beginning of 2022 and the age-old question of “is X amount of
VRAM enough” has popped up yet again. The debate is as old as gaming graphics cards,
to be honest. I remember the debate between 128MB and 256MB. Heck, I remember sitting
on the fence on which model of the 8800 GTS I was going to get, 320 or 640MB. And now,
we’re in the gigabyte debate. The question today is what does 4GB of VRAM look like at 1080p
on modern AAA gaming. In this video I want to go over a couple of the biggest titles
from the past year to try to shed some light on the hot question of the moment!
To start off, I feel like the answer is obvious, but what spurred this question right here,
right now? The recent launch of the Radeon RX 6500 XT, if anything, kicked off the debate of the
usefulness of launching a new mainstream graphics card with 4GB of VRAM. I mean, last generation
the RX 5500 XT and the GTX 1650 Super seemed to hold down things just fine, and I’ve been
gaming on the go with a mobile GTX 1650. So, I figured I’d take a handful of some of the biggest
games to launch recently and see just what they demanded and used in 1080p gaming with a 4GB GPU.
Now I didn’t do this experiment with a Radeon RX 6500 XT,
mainly because I don’t have one here in my office, and because this applies to
many more GPUs that people are still using. A GPU I do have with 4GB of VRAM
and current driver support on hand is a GTX 1650 Super. So I’m using that for this comparison.
In order to monitor VRAM usage I used Windows Task Manager. I also used GeForce overlay for
performance numbers, as well as GPU-z for other monitoring on-screen so you can see it all in
action for yourselves. The big advantage of keeping the Task Manager going is that, thanks
to an excellent update from Microsoft, you can see both the dedicated VRAM in use AND the amount of
system memory it’s sharing. Both of which are super useful for what we’re looking at today.
As far as the testing platform, I’m using my X570 test bench
with the Ryzen 7 5800X, 32GB of DDR4 3600, and the games are run from a T.Force Cardea
C440 PCIe 4.0 Drive. Now with that all out of the way let’s jump into the results.
First and foremost we’ve got Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and why not toss this one right up
there on the Very High Preset to see what happens? Yeah, the GTX 1650 Super completely
blew out the VRAM budget and borrowed 3GB from the system. Basically, if you want
to run these settings relatively smoothly at 1080p you’re going to want 8GB of VRAM.
But hey it’s surprisingly smooth in the benchmark…but not in the game.
Even at Medium we still blow the budget, and it isn't viable either. So
if Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is on your wishlist and you’re on a 4GB GPU then
prepare to make serious compromises in order to keep the gameplay smooth. I mean, I play
on the lowest settings at 900p on my laptop, but that’s a 14” screen so it’s not THAT bad I guess.
But let's look at what a difference it makes in actual in-game image quality. From this scene,
we can see a clear difference in distant detail, where the lighting is affecting
the trees further out, and the details are much more defined in the Very High setting.
It’s not an experience-breaking difference, but it’s quite noticeable
in actual game play when stuff is popping in and out much closer to your character.
Alright, on to Resident Evil Village that features an engine that can eat up VRAM
quickly. So checking out some presets here,
let’s start with Graphics priority first. And surprisingly it doesn’t manage to completely
blow out the budget and does a decent job with performance and VRAM usage.
Dropping to Balanced yields pretty much the same results but with even better performance.
Changing things to ‘recommended’ pulls settings down even further,
but provides an insane performance jump. That performance jump is mostly from the
game switching the render to interlaced which effectively drops the resolution. If you want
more information about how that compares in detail we’ve got an analysis video on that topic.
Visuals hold up nicely and it’s good to see a modern game run this smooth with so little to
work with. Side by side you’ll likely be hard pressed to find a difference between balanced
and graphics priority. Even when the game is using interlaced settings the overall aesthetic
of the game holds up, but it’s clear there’s a whole lot more aliasing going on when used
in the Recommended option. So unlike Valhalla,
I think you can have a good time with a 4GB graphics card in Resident Evil Village.
Guardians of the Galaxy is next on the list and this game is super fun,
one of my surprise favorites of the past year. But this game is pretty stressful on the VRAM,
and performance in general, for this class of graphics card,
especially if you want to run the game at very high settings.
If you want those settings you’re going to want to look for more VRAM
as you’re going to blow the budget with this game easily.
And in this game, that results in pretty hard stuttering during gameplay.
Moving to Medium smooths things out, but the game does still reserve a bit of system ram for asset
swaps which happens pretty often and is normal. The Low preset makes the game much more playable
and brings the framerate up to a smoother level but this is still a decently hard game to run.
Visually speaking you’re not going to leave much off the table
moving from medium to low. It only has an obvious effect on lighting reflective
objects, like the white spores and metallic surfaces. Honestly not enough to write home about,
so as far as Guardians is concerned, it’s doable with 4GBs, but it’s not as bad as Valhalla.
Lastly, we have God of War, a game that many many people are really enjoying at the moment,
even if you only have 4GB of VRAM. This one is a pleasant surprise with Ultra settings
tapping out 4GB at 1080p, and you’re more limited here on sheer GPU grunt than VRAM.
Original settings however are way less stringent on both the VRAM and the GPU core,
resulting in a much, MUCH smoother gameplay experience. So if you’re on
a 4GB GPU and don’t mind the original settings, then game on for God of War.
And honestly, once this game is going I don’t think you’re going to really care
that much about the small extra details in the background. Don’t get me wrong, better
shadows and textures are super nice, but it’s not really a game changer here, just nice to have.
So what did we learn about 4GB performance here?. Sure this testing focused on only 4 titles,
but they are the kind of games that people who are trying to enjoy on PC at 1080p would
likely be wanting to kick around. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was passable, Resident Evil Village did
really well, Guardians of the Galaxy was a bit too stressful, and God of War delivered. All in all,
if you’re still on a 4GB card you can get by for now depending on which title you want to play.
But after doing this and looking and playing the games with this card, I don’t think I could
recommend buying into this level of performance and features, right now or going forward. It’s
just a little too underperforming and quite honestly is barely passable. It’s fine if you
already had it, and you should be okayish for a little while longer, but I don’t think I would
invest in it at this point unless you are just focusing on a backlog of older games
So what do you think about 4GB graphics cards in today’s time, are you using one? If so,
share with us your thoughts, tips, and tricks for getting the most out of them in the comment
section below. And if you enjoyed this video let me know by hitting that thumbs up and make
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