AMD says ‘more memory matters’, just as NVIDIA is set to launch a 12GB RTX 4070 GPU

AMD says the Radeon GPU has more for the money

AMD reminds gamers that the Radeon RX 6800 series with 16GB of VRAM is now available for less than $599 (the price of the upcoming RTX 4070).

Just hours away from our NVIDIA RTX 4070 reviews, AMD has decided to remind all gamers that the memory capacity of modern graphics cards is just as important as performance. The higher the resolution and “film quality textures”, the more likely that gamers will encounter memory limitation.

Turns out AMD saw that two years ago when it introduced its Navi 21 GPU cluster with 16GB of VRAM. In fact, that number has been increased to 20GB and 24GB with the Radeon RX 7900 series. Gamers using Radeon GPUs are safe from high memory demands, but they may need a little more patience if they expect full ray tracing or FSR3 in games. Like Cyberpunk 2077.

Radeon RX Recommended Gaming GPUs, Source: AMD

The company explains how gamers can find a large cache useful in recent titles. New games like Resident Evil 4 or The Last Of Us Part 1 in 4K require a lot of memory. Gamers can watch peak memory allocation of up to 17.5GB in 4K and with RT ON.

However, one must remember that allocation does not always mean memory usage. These days, games can adjust texture resolution depending on the available frame buffer, but there’s no doubt that games at 4K or even 1440p with new titles will definitely need a high-end GPU these days with over 8GB of VRAM.

Memory allocation in modern 4K titles, source: AMD

So far, none of the RTX 40 GPUs released to date have less than 12GB of VRAM. This configuration will remain the lowest spec for the Ada Lovelace architecture even with the arrival of the RTX 4070 non-Ti later this week. However, rumors already point to an RTX 4060 series with 8GB of VRAM.

Gamers on a tight budget may also run into a similar problem with the Radeon RX 7700/7600 series mobile phones, which are limited to 8GB of 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 didn’t push the industry forward with higher VRAM capacity than the last generation.

source: AMD