The Startling Cause of Your Powerful PC's Inability to Play the Latest Games Is This

Photo Credit: GameTyrant The 2023 PC release dates are off to a shaky start. The Last of Us Part One, The Hogwarts Legacy, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Forspoken, and most recently, and significantly, The Resident Evil 4 Remake, all debuted in poor conditions with crashes, hiccups, and worse performance despite a little improvement in graphic quality. The fact that the graphics cards from recent years aren't capable of meeting the demands of modern games is a major factor in this.

What exactly does your VRAM do?

Consider your graphics card to be a standalone computer. The majority of processing work is performed by your computer's processor and RAM combined. Your RAM stores the information your processor needs to perform calculations while your processor performs the actual calculations. Your computer would be too slow to be of any use if your CPU had to go out to your hard drive each time it wanted to do a calculation. Photo Credit: Gaming Scan Same thing applies to your graphics card. The VRAM stores the data required for that processing while the GPU does the actual processing. Higher resolutions are significantly greater in size compared to lower ones, therefore texture resolution is where this is most obviously apparent. But, other data also enters and exits VRAM, including geometry, shadow maps, and, most importantly, shaders. Shaders are complicated and take up a lot of space in VRAM, especially in games that use ray tracing. The requirements of contemporary AAA games frequently exceed the typical 8GB of VRAM you've always needed, especially if you're playing at higher resolutions. This is due to increasing texture resolution. Regrettably, not many last-generation GPUs were designed to handle this issue.

Issue with the RTX 3070 Ti

ExtremeTech didn't hold back when it published a round-up of RTX 3070 Ti reviews. The low VRAM on the card was a "long-term issue," and now we're beginning to see the effects of that issue. Also Read: It Is Sensible To Have 16GB Of RAM For iPad Pro Resident Evil 4 Remake has the potential to consume up to 8GB of VRAM just for texturing, however there are far lower limits available. The lowest graphics setting for The Last of Us Part One can use around 7GB, and the highest setting can use up to 14GB. Furthermore, Hogwarts Legacy consumed close to 8GB of VRAM while ray tracing was off and around 13GB with it turned on. Its impacts are already evident. Hardware Unboxed discovered significant stuttering in The Last of Us Part One's early testing compared to 4GB of VRAM. Photo Credit: TechSpot It is disappointing that graphics cards that ought to be powerful enough to run contemporary games are instead experiencing crashes and stuttering due to VRAM issues. Yet, the majority of this issue is directed against Nvidia. The greatest graphics cards available right now are made by Nvidia, but AMD and Intel have worked to increase VRAM, even in entry-level models. For instance, Intel's Arc A770 costs $350 but comes with 16GB of VRAM. Even the RTX 4070 Ti, which costs $900, has only 12GB. With its intermediate RX 6700 XT, AMD chose 12GB of memory, while Nvidia remained with 8GB. In games like Hogwarts Legacy, where Intel's GPU performs significantly better than its price would imply, this can be important.