Comment by KerrAvon
6 hours ago
> the 24GB card that's been sitting in gaming PCs since 2022.
I'd wager most people have less. In 2022 a 3080 might have 12 GB if you were lucky, 10 if you weren't -- and you paid for the privilege. A current RTX 5080 is only 16GB.
In 2021 I was considering getting a then-old K80 card because it had the highest VRAM on the market at 24GB and all newer cards had 8 or 12GB.
(Apparently this is because the K80 is two separate GPUs on one card, but I still think it counts if you only have one slot to put it in)
The most recent Steam Hardware Survey[0] lists the most popular VRAM at 16GB in 25.9% of users. Second most popular build is 8GB in 25.3%. >=24GB is ~7%, which is quite a bit higher than I expected.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/En
As RAM prices are so nuts, I picked up a used gaming laptop early this year with an RTX 3070 (i.e. 8GB) to match the specs for my gaming tower that's run everything I'm interested in just fine. That includes recent Unreal 5.x games (Satisfactory, Fortnite, etc.) with high graphics settings on a 4k TV (60hz). There aren't a ton of games that require more than 8GB of GPU ram.
I'm still getting by mostly fine with a 4GB 1650 Super. (2020 vintage.)