Same price as B580, even though this has less VRAM it should be a faster option overall. There are many games where even though it's VRAM limited it still easily outperforms the B580 eg. BL4.
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Hi @MHLoppy, I was just wondering what amount of vram you recommend if buying a new GPU
You can read some recommendations here: https://www.techspot.com/review/2856-how-much-vram-pc-gaming…
Their opinion — which is of course not universal — is:
Realistically, gamers should have been demanding back in 2023 that anything over $300 [USD] be armed with at least 12GB of VRAM, and anything over $400 [USD] should have had 16GB. AI boom or not, they still want to sell some GeForce GPUs, and the same applies to AMD.
Regardless of what did or didn't happen, with the exception of entry-level options, you shouldn't be buying 8GB graphics cards anymore. 12GB is now the bare minimum, and 16GB is the ideal target.
And they say that because of the results of their testing:
So there you have it: more and more games are using over 8GB of VRAM, particularly at 1440p with high-quality settings. As we've known for a while now, ray tracing does increase VRAM usage substantially, so if you are interested in RT moving forward, we recommend a minimum of 16GB.
For those of you gaming at 1080p, 8GB is often right on the edge for the latest titles, and in some cases, high or ultra settings will push you over. At 1440p, we've found 8GB to be more suitable for medium presets, but if you want to enable ray tracing, it's likely going to be a problem.
Thanks heaps, I was mainly asking to validate you initial reply to OPs post :)
@Dan24: It's still likely the best deal at $400 new (hence my vote on the deal), but anyone in the market for a card at this price point would be well-served to take a look at the used market or see if any of their friends are upgrading and might have a GPU to sell.
On the very most poorly-optimized games, with settings maxed and RTX on and everything, you can now run of VRAM if you have only 8GB, even at 1080p.
It's insane for them to make a 8GB card in 2025, especially when making them 16GB is only like 10 bucks more in actual production cost.
…but if you're buying a 9060XT you aren't expecting to be able to max every game. It's stupid, but this is still the best option available for 400 bucks, right?
Gamers do get carried away and recommend nobody buy an 8GB, and get a slower 12GB or 16GB card instead, which is even stupider. Defeats the whole purpose of avoiding 8GB in the first place.
(Reminds me of the "buy a slower 6-core CPU because 4 cores might not be enough soon" which was pop gamer wisdom about 10 years before 6 cores even helped at all).
It's insane for them to make a 8GB card in 2025
It's not, it's just still at a price point nobody wants it at. We want to continue to try and optimise for memory usage over time because it offers opportunities for mobile gaming and standalone VR platforms.
Thankfully 3GB GDDR7 chips are slowly getting cheap enough to address the issue.
I think nvidia will purposefully limit vram to sell newer GPUs later, nothing to do with price as GPUs are overprices already and a tier lower since last 2 generations.
@John Doh: DDR prices have clearly been dropping to accommodate similar configurations for DDR5, so I doubt that's the case at all, it's likely manufacturing volume has only started to ramp this quarter, so order volumes are only coming about now. There's now recent reporting of spot prices surging, so that perhaps suggests stock is now being hoovered up for some kind of launch (not just NVIDIA-related, of course).
NVIDIA will make use of neural compression tech to reduce VRAM totals for an existing level of rasterised quality - of course - but keep in mind they want to run a bunch of different neural models alongside that, and promote that across most of their stack, so cards will still need at least 12 GB of VRAM for 1440p to push features like path tracing and its associated neural shader techniques.
The good news is that it will be really easy for them to do that on a 128-bit bus, giving them a big selling point for RTX 50 Super and RTX 60 series cards establishing 1440p gaming as the baseline and 4K being highly popularised, similar to how they promoted 1440p as being highly popularised in (I think?) 2019 with the RTX 20 series.
Thankfully 3GB GDDR7 chips are slowly getting cheap enough to address the issue.
3GB GDDR7 chips are already only $10 USD each. Retail, not wholesale, so the cost for manufacturers would be less.
https://videocardz.com/newz/samsung-gddr7-3gb-modules-now-av…
So AMD could be putting 12GB instead of 8GB into these cards for less than thirty bucks more. In a 400 dollar product.
So yeah, "insane" is exactly the right word. It's weird, pants-on-head, anti-consumer, shoot-yourself-in-the-foot behaviour.
@ItsMeAgro: Typically the GPU manufacturer sells the RAM in a kit at a profit, so no, they won't be doing that. They need to pair these things up properly and make reasonable money within the context of the market, especially given the recent history of inflated GPU prices at retail.
That would likely put it at $8-$12 USD per stick, which brings us back to my original point: why would you pay for a 12GB 9060XT or 5060 Ti when it costs virtually the same as a 16GB model?
Still ok on 1080p . But this is more about sending a message
I feel really uncomfortable recommending anyone buy a brand new 8GB GPU for gaming unless it's at fire sale prices or for "esports" titles exclusively đź«