SEEPAGE 78 for the full review
THANKS FOR THE MEMORY
© GETTY IMAGES/FUTURE PLC
WHY NVIDIA’S STINGY MEMORY BUSES AREN’T JUST BAD FOR BANDWIDTH
Just enough. That’s been Nvidia’s approach to graphics memory for a while now. Previous-gen Ampere cards are a good example. The RTX 3080 got 10GB of VRAM. That was just enough at the end of 2020, but looks increasingly marginal today.
Why, exactly, are graphics cards so expensive? With every new GPU launch comes the same refrain: nice card, shame about the price. Everyone seems to agree that PC graphics cost too much, so are $600 GPUs the new mainstream reality? Is there no going back on fourfigure prices for higher-performing boards? Or is there hope for something approaching a return to what you might call historical pricing models?
Ditto the 8GB bequeathed to the RTX 3070 and RTX 3070 Ti models. It was just enough two years ago—not so much today. The problem is the number of games that use more than 8GB of graphics memory even at 1080p, let alone higher resolutions, is definitely on the up. Notable holders of the dubious honor of breaching 8GB at 1080p include The Last of Us, Hogwarts Legacy, Resident Evil 4, A Plague Tale: Requiem, The Callisto Protocol, and several more.